English football in the 1970s is typically remembered in either one of two ways. Some will recall the long-maned maverick players who enjoyed a post-match Watneys Party Seven, the charismatic managers with a social conscience, and the more egalitarian competitive conditions that meant a team like Nottingham Forest could rise from relatively little to win the European Cup.

Others, though, will think of running terrace battles in decrepit stadiums, the persistent racist abuse of the few black players, and the first signs of a sport departing from its working-class roots. Any history of 1970s football has to account for both of these depictions, as Jon Spurling, the author of Get It On: How the ’70s Rocked Football, is well aware. ‘I’ve plugged this book on Twitter and Facebook as “a golden era”, “a brilliant time”,’ he tells Tribune. ‘Well, I don’t agree.’

Though a child of the era, Spurling keeps any sense of nostalgia in check while retelling the story of what he persuasively describes as football’s ‘first modern decade’, with all that entails. In this long overdue history of the period, the social and political forces of a changing Britain ripped the national sport from its sepia-tinged image during the 1950s and ’60s to leave it much changed—and only some of it for the better.

Get It On’s great strength is the catalogue of interviews, conducted by Spurling over the course of twenty-five years with those who experienced this acceleration into the modern era first hand. The majority of the subjects are former players and managers—this is first and foremost a football book—with as much space devoted to conversations with George Best and Jack Charlton as those with the heroes of Hereford’s famous 1972 FA Cup run.

Yet other interviews with personalities operating in English football’s orbit—artists, photographers, and kit manufacturers among them—develop the book’s essential wider context of a changing sport.

One theme Spurling returns to regularly is the creeping commercialism of the game during the period in question. Through small things like sponsorship deals, novelty records, and the invention of the modern-day pundit, more money flows into the game, its class composition begins to be diluted, and its very fabric is gradually but irreversibly changed. The man on the pitch is no longer the same as the man in the stand.

Colour television is the main catalyst to Spurling’s mind. ‘It literally brings them to life,’ he says. ‘Managers and players are suddenly awakened to the fact that their profile is going to be raised. It’s ten years now since the end of the maximum wage. Footballers, and certainly top footballers, are definitely middle class and some of them are earning more off the pitch through endorsements and newspaper columns than they were from the club.’

Even the referees were not immune to indulging in this elevated profile, as Derek Nippard and his assistants demonstrated when taking a lap honour at the end of the 1978 FA Cup final, for which they were reprimanded by the Football Association. That is just one instance in Get It On where a friction between the traditional and the modern can be detected, and there is the sense that a certain innocence was being lost.

‘Whenever you have change, there’s opposition to it,’ says Spurling. ‘I think it depended on who you were, but yes, there was a feeling that the whole thing was quite vulgar.’ This divide often fell on generational lines. ‘The tension running through the book is that you have old-school managers who struggle to understand the new breed of what I call “baby boom footballer” coming through. A lot of managers don’t like the swagger their young stars have. They’re not conservatives, but they’ve got conservative attitudes towards new footballers.’

But whatever divisions begin to emerge along class or generational lines, the main protagonists of the era all share at least one thing in common. ‘I think football back in the ’70s is still the working-class game but a white working-class game,’ says Spurling. ‘The number of black lads in the crowd is minimal because they fear for their own safety, and you can’t blame them either.’

Conversations with some of the few black players of the period in Get It On illustrate not only the suspicion, abuse, and mindless threats to life that they suffered—such as when a carving knife was thrown at Bobby Fisher and Lawrie Cunningham while playing against Millwall, or when Barrow’s Dave Busby had to reassure a local newsagent he had ‘come to buy a newspaper, not to rob you’—but how lonely, alienating, and helpless an experience it was.

‘There was a feeling that you almost had to get on with it,’ says Spurling. ‘There were no Raheem Sterlings who would call out the racists. They acted alone. As Trevor Lee told me: “It was our problem.” There was no network.’ There was so much abuse, black players were left with little choice but to endure. ‘I was struck by what Phil Walker at Millwall said to me: “We’d had all the abuse at non-league level so we thought we may as well get paid for it?”’

While racism remains a malignancy within football to this day, the strong and unified anti-racist stance taken by personalities like Sterling and his England teammates is an unmistakably positive step. There is a greater social consciousness around today’s game, even if it does not always extend as far as it should; while reading Get It On, it is tempting to locate the 1970s as the first time that English football is used as a political tool.

That is firstly seen cynically and for electoral means with Harold Wilson—‘The first of many politicians to realise that sporting success for a country could be good news for him,’ according to Spurling—and his preoccupation with the timing of the 1970 general election to coincide with England reaching the semi-finals of the World Cup that summer. Alf Ramsey’s side lost in the quarter-finals to West Germany and Labour, of course, lost the election.

More optimistically, it is seen in Bill Shankly’s belief of football as an expression of solidarity. ‘I believe the only way to live and to be truly successful is by collective effort, with everyone working for each other, everyone helping each other and everyone having a share of the rewards at the end of the day,’ the former Liverpool manager once argued. And though Shankly’s socialism is no revelation to those with even the slightest familiarity with English football in the 1970s, Get It On places Shankly’s politics in its proper context.

‘I think he’s probably the most politically-minded and politically outspoken manager ever. His is the first authentic voice in football, he does not tone down his accent,’ says Spurling. ‘When Liverpool economically began to struggle in the ’70s during containerisation, he said to Tommy Smith that we must be aware of the pain these families are going through. His own village, Glenbuck, had effectively shut down and knew the pain that a recession could bring. He is definitely a throwback to heavy industry, probably the last manager of that type.

‘One story that didn’t make the book was that there’s a guy called Stan Hey, who wrote Auf Wiedersehen, Pet,’ Spurling adds. ‘He worked in a garage in Liverpool and Shankly drove in one day and left his car there. When he came to pick it up, he said: ‘Are you going to the FA Cup final on Saturday, lads?’ They said no, they haven’t got tickets. An hour later he came back. Stan Hey thought there was something wrong with the car. Shankly had brought them six complimentary tickets.’

Anecdotes such as those play into that ‘golden era’ trope again, but as Spurling admits, some things have been lost since that time that were worth keeping. ‘I think because football was less monied then, players earned a more realistic wage, they were more on a level with the people who went to watch them. Even though they were earning more money, there was not the distance between fans and footballers there is now. That is missed.’

Like his book, Spurling keeps an even-handedness when assessing a decade in English football that changed much, but perhaps not enough. ‘Stadia are awful,’ he adds. ‘They look cool on YouTube with packed terracing and all that. But we know how dangerous that could be. You have the decline of the England team, hooliganism rampaging through football, and the racism element for the small clutch of black players who were playing at the time as well. You have the good and the bad—and much of it still lingers to this day.’