I was born in February 1967, which means I will be 60 next year and have still not seen England win a major tournament. Our women have partly made up for that with two Euros wins, but what English football fans really want is to lay the ghost of 1966 to rest once and for all. With the World Cup almost upon us, it felt like exactly the right time to look back at the tournament that first properly captured my imagination, Argentina 1978.
My earliest World Cup memories are from 1974. England had failed to qualify after a campaign that will forever be associated with the heroics of Polish goalkeeper Jan Tomaszewski, who kept England out in the final qualifying game and denied the nation a place in the finals. The impact on the country was enormous, as if English football had died, and part of our culture with it. Scotland, though, were there, and I remember following their campaign with growing interest.
By 1978, my interest in football had taken over my life. I had been to my first match in 1975, watching Manchester United in the old Second Division. My weekly comic had changed from Disney’s Donald and Mickey to Shoot. My bedroom walls were covered in posters. And I had discovered the thing that would become a lifelong obsession: the Panini album.
There is nothing quite like the experience of opening a fresh packet of Panini stickers. The smell alone takes me straight back to being eleven years old. Got, got, got, not got. Negotiating swaps in the playground. The desperate hunt for those final few elusive stickers that somehow never seemed to appear. Commercial exploitation of children is nothing new, as I noted when I counted that my 1978 World Cup album needed 525 stickers to complete, nearly double the previous one.
England had again failed to qualify for 1978, but Scotland were there in some style. Ally MacLeod’s team had famously beaten England at Wembley, 25,000 fans came to Hampden Park to wave them off in an open-top bus, and when a journalist asked MacLeod what he planned to do after the World Cup, he replied simply: retain it. The confidence was extraordinary, and there was even a hit record to send them on their way.
What followed was one of the great deflations in sporting history. A shock defeat to Peru. A draw with Iran. And then a glorious, heartbreaking near-miss against the Netherlands, with Archie Gemmill scoring one of the great World Cup goals before Johnny Rep ended the dream. Ally’s army went home. MacLeod lost his job. The competition carried on without them.
For me and my friends, though, the tournament had given us a new set of heroes. Argentina played with flair, passion and swagger that we had never quite seen before. Mario Kempes could seemingly score at will. Osvaldo Ardiles was a dancing genius. And the ticker tape, those extraordinary cascades of paper that greeted the home team in every stadium, seemed like something from another world entirely. Growing up in 1970s Britain, South America felt genuinely exotic, and watching those matches through the television set in our living room felt like a window onto something enormous.
Argentina won the final, beating the Netherlands after extra time. Kempes scored twice. The ticker tape came raining down. And I was hooked on the World Cup for life. Decades of English near misses and abject failures have not dampened my enthusiasm. As I write this, I have just opened my brand new 2026 Panini album. It needs 990 stickers to complete. I am not sure my marriage will survive it.
Are you looking forward to the World Cup? And do you remember Argentina 1978? I’d love to hear from you, so leave a comment below or join the conversation in our Facebook group. And if you would like to get your hands on our My 70’s TV Childhood Theme Tune Game, a nostalgic family game for people who grew up with 1970s British television, add your name to the waitlist right here.
Take care,
Oliver
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What a fantastic episode, so many memories and so much to unpack..My WC memories really start in 1974, though I do recall the general disapointment of England losing 3-2 to the West Germans in 1970 i was only 6. I loved the game from a very early age and I can recall watching the cup final every year from 71 onwards. The 1973 qualifier V Poland at Wembley I can still recall as clear as day, the performance of ‘The Clown’ Polish keeper Tomaszewski was unbelievable I am not sure in all my years of watching football since then I have ever seen an England team create more chances. So 1974 in West Germany and after the first few games it was clear that we were all becoming fans of the wonderful dutch masters with the imperious Johan Cruyff (who I was already aware of from Ajax winning European Cups in 71,72 & 73) quickly becoming my favourite player. Unfortunately what seems like a lifetime of being upset by German wins started with that final. My father was not a football fan, but my brother were always allowed to watch and he would find something else to do (he had many hobbies). So onto 78 and like you we watched as many we could and I was 13 (nearly 14) and fought hard to stay up with my brother (he was 17) to watch the late games I am sure we saw some but not all. I took my support of the dutch to another tournament was once again left disappointed as Argentina deservedly won the final and in Kempes I had a new footballing hero. The other thing I recall from 74 was my brother and I holding our own world cup on the subutteo pitch playing each game of the tournament before it was actually played, we used my copies of shoot (yes I got it too) to memories the names of the players so that we coud commentate whilst we played. Fantastic memories thank you once again Oliver your podcast so frequently takes me back to places that I hold close to my heart.