I knew, too, that football's reach had extended a long time before Fever Pitch. A lot of the people I watched and played the game with were, like me, first–generation middle class; we were the beneficiaries of post–war social mobility. We had been to university, but our parents hadn't, and in many cases we loved football because our fathers and grandfathers loved football. And in any case, when England won the World Cup in 1966, and George Best became the Fifth Beatle, the game threw off a lot of its old class connotations, and loving it became as uncomplicated as loving pop music. Lots of these kids stopped attending games in the Eighties, when football was sick, and then came back in the mid–Nineties, when it got well again. (I didn't stop, although I should have done, and my persistence was one of the ways in which I was qualified to write the book in the first place.) When young men stopped trying to beat each other to a pulp – or when the police learnt how to stop them, at least – everyone came back. There didn't seem anything very sociologically complicated about that. But Fever Pitch was published just as our stadiums were becoming healthier, more populated, friendlier to families and women, and, as a consequence, it got credit it didn't earn, and, sometimes, blame it didn't deserve. Later, I found out that the same patterns and debates were taking place in other countries, notably the US, a country that mostly ignored Fever Pitch, for obvious reasons. Everywhere, it seems, professional sport has become monetised and gentrified. Executives are no longer interested in entertaining their clients at the theatre and the opera; the middle classes everywhere are different people now, with different backgrounds, different tastes.