Back in the 1970s, when fathers stood on the terraces with their sons, football was rooted in the local community. In this extract from his acclaimed book, And the Sun Shines Now, a Hillsborough survivor charts how clubs lost touch with their fans

Bobby Stokes. There you go. Not one of the greats, not one of my heroes, not even one of my team. But he was the first player I saw score a goal live on television. The magic of that goal was that it ever crept in at all: a diagonal shank from 20 yards that ambled past Alex Stepney in the Man Utd goal and gave Second Division Southampton victory in the 1976 FA Cup final. It was a revelatory moment for a six-year-old, for now I realised anyone could do that; anyone could win the FA Cup, if Southampton, and Bobby Stokes, and that goal could. So, at around 5.15pm on a May day in 1976, doors in our street were thrown open, and my best mate and I, and our two big brothers, and the big lad from a few doors down ran out on to the green in front of our houses and started winning FA Cups for our own teams, for our mums and dads, and for the glory.

I might be making this up, actually… because I can’t really remember what I was doing at around 5.15pm on 1 May 1976, after Peter Rodrigues, with his salt-and-pepper hair, had led Mick Channon, Bobby Stokes, David Peach and the rest up the famous old steps at Wembley. If I like to think I ran out of the front door and recreated Stokes’s moment, this is because for me – for millions of men in Britain – the best of our childhood is refracted through football. Football is more than a means for boys to grow into an adult world, and to earn the respect of our dads or grudging older brothers; it is a way of writing our identities as we grow.

And I’m not making this up: 1976 was the year the green outside our house baked and cracked open. It was the year the water stopped running from the kitchen taps. And it was the year I started playing football for real – every day, every hour when the light shone, in the year it shone longer than in any other. An abiding memory of my mum in the 1970s is of a woman with a Purdey haircut standing at the door of a pebble-dashed house, jabbing her watch while I blipped around in the dusk like a firefly behind a ball.

John would be there. One of my best mates at primary school, he was an orthodox right-midfielder, long-running and honest in the English style, though susceptible to a nutmeg. We weren’t half bad; we could trap and flick and volley, and pull off stunning saves, and we wore genuine Sondico goalie gloves.

A football doesn’t have contours, but to a six-year-old boy it was a means of mapping the world. It was a football that first took me off the green in front of our house and to the neighbourhood beyond. I could blame the fact that I had strayed from the safety of our road on a football innocently rolling away, bouncing off a kerb and over a road, or blown half a street in the breeze. And following that ball I’d find streets I’d never seen before, and an adventure playground in the woods. I learned to read traffic, stop that ball rolling, and ask strangers politely for my ball back, please.

By 1977, sloppy ball control was life’s first lesson that pleasure might come at a cost. At 75p from the corner shop, a football was equivalent to five weeks’ pocket money. Fights would break out – genuine fist fights – if bigger lads tried to walk off with our Bay City Rollers football. And we learned that power wasn’t everything, that sometimes it was better to pass the ball into the goal, rather than blast it between two jumpers and into a hedge. Because burst balls would sit in a hedge for weeks – like traitors’ heads, they served as a grisly reminder of the cost of screwing up. And by 1977, the Bay City Rollers had screwed up – impaled on Mr Seymour’s hedge.

By June 1978, Mr Callaghan and Mr Healey had come to the rescue, and with my inflation-linked pocket money I’d got my hands on a real beauty, a plastic World Cup ball, panelled in black and silver hexagons bearing the names of Peru, Iran, Holland, Scotland, Argentina, Brazil, Italy… Each thorny scratch on that ball became an insult to the brilliance of Cubillas, Antognoni or Johnny Rep. I would nurse that ball down sloping streets, bounce it up kerbs to set up headers, chip it across roads between the traffic (always a Datsun or Capri, in those days, or a Kawasaki 125). Running with a football, aged seven or eight, made team-mates of passing strangers: grown men, on their way home from work, were cut down to my size – unable to resist the temptation to say: “Go on, son, give us a kick.” To millions of boys growing up in the 1970s there was no such thing as a paedophile, only an old geezer who couldn’t pass for toffee.

And yet I’m painting a rose-tinted spectacle. I must be, for it is now a truth rarely questioned in Britain that the 1970s were a disaster. It is one of the axioms of our age. The decade is rolled out like a stick to beat into people that while the banks, the press, the economy and the politicians may be rotten in 2014, we must never forget that where we came from was so much worse – and where we came from was the 70s. It was the decade when everything changed, and it had to, because ours was a country paralysed by the unions, powered by candles and drowning in rubbish. While strikes left the dead unburied in the streets, we were stuffing our mouths with Black Forest gateau and Hemeling. Documentaries now will paint us as a people too gauche even to realise that we were growing fat and stupid on cliches, forgetting of course that we were actually laughing at this stuff as we ate it. No, the historians insist: by the mid-70s, things were so dire that was it any wonder the likes of General Sir Walter Walker and other old soldiers were ready to step in and shore up a country unable to fuel its schools, homes and factories for more than three days a week?

Southampton captain Peter Rodrigues (right) holds aloft the FA Cup in 1976 following his team’s victory against Man United. Photograph: Colorsport/REX

So how is it that in 2004 the New Economics Foundation reported that 1976 was the happiest year in Britain since the second world war? Part of the reason for my contented generation is that we had something approaching full employment in Britain until the early 70s, which meant there was relatively little need for people to uproot and look for work elsewhere. Which meant that communities remained intact, and neighbours had names and became part of the team.

And part of the reason is that the sunniest year in living memory was also the point at which inequality in Britain reached its lowest since the second world war. If the likes of me and John are part of a happy generation, perhaps it’s because we grew up in a decade when most of us were happy to be normal – to be equal and unremarkable. And in the year Peter Rodrigues became the most exotic-sounding footballer in Britain, nothing was more normal than a boy trundling along the street with a plastic football at his feet, lost in his own world and finding his way in it at the same time.

Where are those boys now? I look out of the window of my flat in north London and I don’t see kids playing in the street, or walking home with steam on their shoulders and scabs on their knees, hotly contesting a goal that never was. I see them ferried instead between “play dates” in 4x4s, faces so blurred behind the windows they could be faces drawn on balloons. And when I do see children playing out on the streets, occasionally, I don’t see a childhood I recognise.

I don’t have children, but many of my friends who do have kids admit to feeling uneasy that their sons don’t look at football, or play the game, with the same passion or expression as we once did. Is this the yearning of a middle-aged generation for a mythical golden age? The evidence suggests not: children today watch top-flight football and play the game in environments unrecognisable from those in which their parents grew up. Experts believe that children’s access to top-flight football has changed so profoundly over the past 30 years that what is sold by the Premier League as a form of family entertainment may well be eroding family bonds.

A survey by Populus in 2008/9 found that, from a sample of 13,000 adults, 90% who attended Premier League football with children felt comfortable in doing so, and 97% felt safe inside and outside the ground. However, while 13% of season tickets sold in the Premier League in 2009/10 went to children, a Premier League fan survey in 2007 found that 43% of adults with kids never took them to the game. When one eliminates concerns over safety and considers, too, the quality of the football, then this must surely be an issue of price. And the price to be paid for all-seater stadiums in the Premier League is that children and young adults are disappearing from the match.

Whereas in Germany standing areas enable tickets for adults at clubs such as Hamburg and Schalke to sell for €15 and upwards, in England, once children reach 16 their parents are often unable to stretch to the price of a second or third adult-priced seat. And this appears to be the point at which supporters drift away from the game in their droves.

In August 2011, in the Guardian, David Conn reported that the average age of a season-ticket holder in the Premier League was 41. While inflation in the UK between 1990 and 2011 stood at 77%, Conn reported, tickets to watch category A matches at Arsenal had risen by 920% over the same period, while the price of the cheapest season tickets at Anfield and Old Trafford had increased by 1,108% and 454% respectively. This has impacted on one match-going demographic above all others. “Premier League surveys for years show a consistent reduction in the proportion of young people, who pay full price from 16,” Conn wrote.

More eye-catching research came from England’s biggest club: in 1968, the average age of supporters on the Stretford End at Old Trafford was 17; by 2008, it was over 40. Similarly, the average age of Newcastle supporters at St James’ Park in 2002 was 35; by 2012, that had risen to 45. These are the same Geordies, simply a decade older.

So where do the teenagers go? There is a widely held suspicion within the game that kids are welcome in their school years not because they are worth cultivating as the next generation of supporters, but because they deliver family groups – Mum and Dad, with their higher spending patterns. As one spokesperson for a leading football supporters’ organisation told me: “Anecdotally, we’re hearing that even teenagers who do have season tickets are feeling disillusioned, because they pay all that money and turn up to see all these initiatives for families. They feel so unwanted.”

What kind of business model is this? According to John Williams, a sports sociologist at Leicester University, it is an American one. “I think the Premier League imagines that some teenage fans may dip in their attendance but return later, when they’re affluent and at work,” he says. “It is a kind of NFL model of fandom.”

It’s certainly a gamble, as Peter Daykin, a member of the Football Supporters’ Federation board, has seen at first hand. Daykin is a Sunderland fan, and in 2013, he tells me: “Kids are going to Sunderland with their parents until they are 15 or 16, then they outgrow that and simply stop going.”

And here the continuity between childhood, adolescence and adulthood is at risk of being broken, and with it club loyalties passed on through families for generations.

In 2013, research conducted by ICM for Capital One, sponsors of the League Cup, found that 48% of fans watched their first live game with their father, but only one in five went on to support the same team as their dads. The survey also found that 39% of supporters chose their local side, and 61% did not. Partly, these shifting loyalties can be attributed to the changing nature of communities: the internet and satellite TV offer children a choice between traditional communities of domicile and communities of interest, which extend on a global scale. And as ticket price inflation of up to 1,000% prevents many people watching their local clubs live, by form of recompense they can watch the game on satellite TV. This is causing a rupture between clubs and their traditional communities.

In 2013, people in Sunderland had the third-lowest average income in the country, placing even the concessionary prices of £17–20 at the Stadium of Light beyond the reach of many teenagers. So, as Peter Daykin explains: “You go around Sunderland on a match day, whether we’re home or away, and you can walk up to pretty much any pub and there’ll be a foreign satellite feed showing the Sunderland game. You can watch it for the price of a few pints, you can stand and have a sing-song, and you can go home. But these kids in the pub won’t just watch Sunderland,” Daykin says, “they’ll watch Villarreal, or Real Sociedad too, because the choice is there and they want to be trendy.”

Sunderland is just down the road, then, but the kids are in the pub watching Spanish football. And as Daykin says, “When kids drift away from the stadium at 17 or 18, their match-day experience becomes imbued with the pub atmosphere. And when they come back to the game in their late 20s, they don’t like it any more.”

Newcastle fans during their game against Sunderland in April 2013: ‘The average age of a season-ticket holder in the Premier League was 41 in 2011.’ Photograph: Stu Forster/Getty Images

The contrast with Germany is stark. In the Bundesliga, young supporters are flowing off the conveyor belt. This is not due reward simply for keeping ticket prices low; there is a positive age-discrimination policy at work too. When I visited Hamburg SV in November 2012, I was alarmed to discover that within the official HSV supporters’ club (which has more than 65,000 members), fans over 35 are required to join the seniors’ department. At 44, I am an old man in Germany, and that’s official. Similarly, the supporters’ club, which has representation at board level, forbids HSV to sell more than 50% of its tickets as season tickets, because “too many season tickets will cause an older fan scene in the future”. It’s a strategy that seems to be working: the most accurate, recent nationwide research (conducted by the German equivalent of the Home Office in 2002) found that the average age of a member of a German supporters’ club was 20.2. More recent research, in 2011, put the average age at 21–30, which means it’s feasible that German fans were half the age of their English counterparts. At the very least, they were over a decade younger on average.

The Germans have a name for the younger generation: they call them Fan-Nachwuchs (“fan offspring”), and they trust them to stand on terraces and in safe-standing areas. Much of this reflects the value the Germans place on integrating young people and adults at football matches. In 1993, a year after the Premier League appeared, the German FA considered the introduction of all-seater stadiums, in light of their long-standing problems with crowd disorder and violence. They rejected the idea on the grounds of cost, declaring: “Football, being a people’s sport, should not banish the socially disadvantaged from its stadiums, and it should not place its social function in doubt.”

The idea of football providing a social function is now in considerable doubt in England. One such function it used to provide was what sociologists call “socialisation”: the modification by children of their behaviour as they mature, and their assimilation into an adult world through an introduction to customs, rituals and mores. It is not difficult to see how football used to serve such a purpose in England: the learning of songs, of standards, fashions and rituals was a key ingredient of going to the game. Today, football still enables children’s socialisation, because socialisation never ceases – children will always learn from the behaviour of adults, and they will adapt to a changing environment. However, the range of adult behaviours to which children are exposed at football has narrowed significantly in the Premier League era. Sharply rising ticket prices, and the planning required to obtain a seat next to friends and family, have transformed English football from a social process, driven by men in crowds, to a form of entertainment – one in which people are repeatedly warned not to stand up, but to sit down where they are directed. This increasingly passive environment has impacted on the bond between fathers and their children.

Peter Daykin is the co-ordinator of the campaign for safe standing at the Football Supporters’ Federation. He is also a parent. “I’ve got a three-year-old and a five-year-old,” he says, “and at some stage I want to take them to football. But although football is much safer today, it’s a far less attractive thing for kids to do now.” According to Daykin, this is because children are now deprived of the chance to socialise with adults in a spontaneous environment. “I fell in love with football because it was about going to Roker Park and seeing for the first time adults behaving in a completely different way to how they normally did,” he says. “Particularly here in the north-east of England, where men didn’t really share their emotions and were quite cold… you could go to the match and all of a sudden you’ve got guys shouting and screaming and hugging one another. You could understand things about humanity at football that you didn’t see anywhere else.”

In England, as we have lost terraces, and younger crowds have lost the chance to mix freely with older men, so we have lost a means to navigate our way from boyhood to manhood. “It’s the good and bad,” says Daykin. “It wasn’t all good, and we’re not trying to airbrush society; but those experiences we had as kids on the terraces were real.”

Daykin happily admits that the quality of football is much better now but, he says, “it was never about the football; it was a social process. When I went to Sunderland from 1987, I started standing at the front of the Fulwell End; then as I got a bit bigger, I’d move to the back, where there was an area known as the Cage, where all the bad lads went. When you were 16, 17 and you thought you were somebody, you’d stand in the Cage, and you thought, This is great! By the time you were 19, 20 you were too cool for the Cage, so you’d go to the Paddock, or stand a little bit away from the away fans, and be cynical and ironic. There was a natural progression.”

As a teenager in the 1980s, it was football that gave me an identity. I grew up in Stevenage, a new town born in 1946 and still devoid of history or culture. When my parents arrived in the town in the 1960s, they did so with identities fully formed: they were Londoners. I was a new-town boy, beaten up on more than one occasion as a teenager not for who I was, but for who my assailants were not: they grew up in a London satellite town but were not Londoners, and they spent their teens beating the shit out of strangers in order to prove they were harder than the people their families had left behind. I sought my identity not in fighting, but in football. And I had grasped its potential aged six, in 1976, when Match of the Day brought the Kop, a pulsating mass of Liverpudlian culture, into my life. I sat on the living-room floor, looked through my bowl haircut, and thought: I want to be part of that when I grow up.

Daykin found something similar. “My parents weren’t from the north-east,” he says, “so I spoke with a different accent to everyone else in Sunderland – so everybody thought I was posh, or foreign! In the playground, I never felt part of things, but when I stood on the Fulwell End at Roker Park, I was exactly the same as everybody else. And when a goal went in, strangers would jump around and hug you. It was really important for me in terms of feeling comfortable, geographically, and in terms of my own cultural identity: football was vital to that. I kind of fell in love with the region, and after I moved away to university, I moved back here. I’ve set up businesses here. Football grounded me in the region, and in who I was and how I feel about who I am. And I want my kids to have that.”

And why can’t they have that?

“Because the difference between seats and terraces is the difference between a form of entertainment and a form of culture… We’ve lost the culture.”

In 2013, at the time of writing, the demand for standing areas appears to be rising among young English supporters. And the business case is compelling: with rail standing – the safe standing model common in Germany – clubs can accommodate 1.8 fans standing for every one sitting, so they have an opportunity to lower ticket prices but increase revenues through extra incidental spend. And as Peter Daykin explains: “Because the prices come down, and those rail standing areas are inherently attractive to children, you’re going to get far more younger people through the door.”

Opponents of safe standing do not cite a potential risk to children standing on terraces; they claim that there is simply no demand for it among young fans. And yet data the Football Supporters’ Federation has obtained from the Championship suggests otherwise: when Cardiff City began to get rid of standing at Ninian Park in 2007, they discovered that 45% of the standing area was taken up by women and 35% by under-16s. Similarly, research across the top four divisions in England consistently shows that 80–90% of fans want standing areas, even if they might not want to stand themselves. The FSF has yet to see any rigorous research into the idea of restoring standing areas that has elicited a negative response.

Tim Gill is a former adviser to the British government and the London mayor on children’s play. He is the man behind the Rethinking Childhood website and blog, and his advice on increasing the fun in children’s play and leisure time is in considerable demand in Britain and Australia. Essentially, all of Gill’s work goes towards making the case for expanding children’s horizons. When I put it to him that football has ceased to fully function as an environment in which children and young adults can socialise – or rather, experience socialisation – he cites the work of an American writer called Jane Jacobs.

“In her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, there’s a chapter called The Uses of Sidewalks: Assimilating Children,” Gill says. “She asks the question: how can people hope to grow up to be responsible adults in big cities, where you can’t possibly know everybody you’re going to meet, but you have to care about them a bit because you have to get along? Jacobs’s argument is you learn that as a child by growing up in a place where there are adults who care about you, and look out for you, even if they’re not your parents or your teachers.”

As a New Yorker, Jane Jacobs considered the sidewalks of Manhattan to be that environment. In the Death and Life of Great American Cities, written in 1961, she described how her children knew the shopkeepers, the business people, the deliverymen… As Tim Gill says: “For Jacobs, that was the paradigm of where you get inducted into being a socially responsible citizen.” He ponders for a moment. “Where does that happen today, in our society?”

It used to happen in football. Not always successfully, of course, and not without difficulties. But for millions of men, football was a place to initiate their sons and daughters into an adult environment, to pass on norms and rituals and standards, and to reveal a side of themselves they would seldom share elsewhere. For boys, especially, it was a rite of passage, with risk and reward, with kudos and boundaries – a social progression.

Today, football is an entertainment industry. And this, as much as anything, appears to unnerve the dads I know, because they realise they can’t bequeath much of themselves through entertainment: their kids can order and buy their own, as they choose. And as the research for Capital One indicates, they are doing just that, and choosing other clubs to support. Culture, on the other hand… this is something we can pass on, something precious, something of us, our pride and our prejudice, the fallible and the hopelessly romantic, the irrational and occasionally hysterical, the real – if only a glimpse.

Today, English football has never been safer, better televised or more entertaining. And arguably, it has never been less about the culture of the people who shaped our football clubs.

And the Sun Shines Now by Adrian Tempany (Faber & Faber, £14.99). To order a copy for £11.99, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.