The story of England’s football team since the moment Bobby Moore accepted the Jules Rimet trophy from the Queen – who was wearing gloves, so he needn’t have bothered wiping his hands beforehand – is one of unsteady progress along a via dolorosa offering only frustration, humiliation and the occasional tantalising glimpse of the unattainable. In the dozen World Cups held since 1966, England’s best performance has been a single semi-final appearance, back in 1990. Germany, defeated in that tumultuous match 50 years ago this week, have since reached the final on six further occasions, winning three of them, including the most recent.

In the European championships, the other major tournament for which England are eligible, the story is even worse. Germany, either in partial or unified form, have reached the final six times, winning three of them. England, despite not having to cope with Brazil and Argentina, who have combined to knock them out of the World Cup on three occasions, have never gone further than their appearance in the semi-final of Euro 96 – when, as in ’66, they enjoyed home advantage.

Given that both countries are equally mad about football, the discrepancy is too glaring to be accidental. To explain the underperformance of one and the superperformance of the other, analysts identify possible structural and philosophical causes, to do with an underlying sense of authenticity conferred by the fans’ part-ownership of Bundesliga clubs and the strategic planning evident in the emphasis placed in Germany on the education of coaches.

In Fifty Years of Hurt (Bantam, £20), Henry Winter credits the Germans with a rather different role in England’s continuing plight. A football writer whose big-money move from the Daily Telegraph to the Times last year was the equivalent of, say, Wayne Rooney switching from Manchester United to Chelsea, Winter seems to believe that it is the failure of the players to spend enough time learning about the two world wars of the 20th century which has forced them to surrender in penalty shootouts.

Last month, a few days before the start of Euro 2016 in France, Winter fulminated in his schoolmasterly way against the decision of the sports scientists travelling with England to cancel plans for the players to visit Thiepval Ridge. The intention had been to salute the 73,367 British soldiers, including 37 former professional footballers, whose names are inscribed on Sir Edwin Lutyens’ great memorial to the casualties of the Somme, which began on 1 July 1916. As Winter pointed out, those 37 included Evelyn Lintott, an England international and the first chairman of the Professional Footballers’ Association, to which all the England players belong.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sir Edwin Lutyens’ Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme. Photograph: Alamy

In Winter’s view, not until those young players are taken en bloc to such places – and he includes Auschwitz and Hiroshima in his personal Baedeker – will they win anything. Imbued with respect for the sacrifice of their forebears, they would be able to focus their emotions and abilities more effectively. The key to success, he believes, amounts to getting them out of the “bubble” in which they exist when brought together for a tournament: a world in which they are left to their own devices between training sessions and mealtimes, with only themselves and their team mates – and their iPhones and Xboxes – for company.

Fifty Years of Hurt is full of such claims. In his most sombrely reflective passage, Winter visits the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire. Pausing at the memorials to the Battle of the River Plate, the Falklands task force, the Dieppe raid and the Cockleshell heroes, he muses on all the times, while travelling with England, that he has witnessed the players’ reluctance to visit the real-life sites of history: the Hiroshima Peace Memorial in 2002, for example, or Robben Island in 2010. He mentions with approval the current Norwich City goalkeeper John Ruddy, whose wedding guests were required to donate to the Help for Heroes charity (“someone with his profession in the right perspective”), and the occasion in 2010, during an under-19 tournament in France, on which the England players were taken to one of the D-Day beaches: “However briefly, it presses the pause button on chatter about cars, women and money, helping them become more rounded people.” Quite how the author comes to be so familiar with the content of the squad’s everyday chit-chat, he does not say. Unfortunately such Winter-approved conduct did not prevent Ruddy’s omission from Roy Hodgson’s squad this summer or help the under-19s in their semi-final against Spain, which they lost 3-1.

Much more underlies England’s dismal record than a failure to salute Colonel Blimp, of course, but Winter’s long trawl for explanations goes largely unrewarded. The book incorporates interviews with former internationals from Jack Charlton to Steven Gerrard, their recollections transcribed and presented in barely edited form, with all the considerable repetition and occasional self-contradiction tediously intact. Everything they say is taken at face value: nothing is seriously challenged or interrogated. On the one hand, we are told, today’s players concentrate on technique at the expense of passion; on the other, they need to control their emotions and work on their skills. Academies are the future; academies are a waste of time. Sam Allardyce, overlooked for the England’s manager’s job in 2006 but finally granted it last week, puts the blame for failure in recent international tournaments on the stifling of opportunities for English-born players by the Premier League clubs’ recruitment of foreign stars.

Winter suggests bringing in more banners, flags and drums to make Wembley more intimidating. No thank you

Winter presents a few reasonable ideas of his own, such as opening some of England’s training sessions to the public, as Brazil used to do, and some wonky ones, like making Wembley “more intimidating” by bringing in more banners, flags and drums. No thank you. The way to make Wembley intimidating is to start winning big matches and big tournaments, and that relies solely on good coaches selecting the right players and tactics.

There are times when Winter fires off short verbless phrases with the overbright ring of middle-market headlines – “the underhand hand of god” (Maradona), “the poacher turned presenter” (Lineker), “the clamour for glamour”, “putsch-and-run tactics” (John Terry’s one-man insurrection during the World Cup in South Africa), “California streamin” (the Premier League’s global digital future) – which add nothing and become irritating. Not half as irritating, however, as his decision to set the book entirely in the present tense, a persistent cause of annoyance as he skips between historical and contemporary time-frames. He skips, the reader stumbles.

Bobby Charlton seldom stumbled on the pitch, but his subdued role in the 1966 final was determined by the two opposing head coaches – Alf Ramsey and Helmut Schön – who decided that he and Franz Beckenbauer should try to mark each other out of the game, thus relieving the afternoon of the keenly anticipated creative contributions of the best players on each side. His disappointment in the midst of triumph adds an interesting undertone to 1966: My World Cup Story (Yellow Jersey, £20), his ghosted memoir of that summer.

He does not quite bring himself to acknowledge that Argentina – “dangerous, superbly gifted and deeply enigmatic”, a team of “marvellous skill and bottomless cynicism” – could have beaten England in the quarter-final and gone on to win the tournament had their captain, Antonio Rattín, not got himself sent off with half an hour gone after spectacularly falling out with the German referee, Rudolf Kreitlein. An Argentinian view of the match is provided by Marcela Mora y Araujo in 1966 and Not All That (edited by Mark Perryman, Repeater, £8.99), an enjoyable collection of essays by a cadre of distinguished football writers – including Amy Lawrence, Philippe Auclair, Simon Inglis, David Goldblatt and Simon Kuper – that examines the tournament from many angles, with the informal but informed tone of the best fanzines. “A good excuse for being conspired against,” Mora y Araujo writes, “with Argentina playing the role of mistreated underdog.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest German referee Rudolf Kreitlein sends of Antonio Rattín during Argentina’s controversial quarter-final against England. Photograph: Central Press/Getty Images

In Four Lions (Head of Zeus, £18.99), Colin Shindler looks at what the stories of four England captains – Billy Wright, Bobby Moore, Gary Lineker and David Beckham – tell us about changes in English life. Told from the perspective of a social historian, it is inevitably an account of how the celebrity culture took root and then took off, neatly bookended by the man who married a Beverley Sister and the man who wed a Spice Girl, their only shared qualities a deep love of football and a desire to make the most of their attributes.

Peter Chapman’s Out of Time (Bloomsbury, £18.99), the most enjoyable of these books, is a memoir of watching the 1966 World Cup as an 18-year-old school leaver in north London. Subtitled “The End of Old-Fashioned Britain”, it quietly evokes the time of Robert McKenzie’s election-forecasting swingometer; the Jay twins, daughters of the president of the Board of Trade, blonde, mini-skirted creatures who were featured most days on the pages of the Daily Express; the seamen’s strike, the biggest withdrawal of labour since the war; and the battles between mods and rockers, whose Islington representatives skirmished close to the the street in which Chapman’s family lived.

Formerly a South American correspondent for the Guardian and ITV, now with the Financial Times, Chapman is as good on the background – a post-war childhood and adolescence, with bomb sites all around – as he is on the football. His love of the game was such that he was already haunting London’s rail termini and the hotels favoured by the big northern clubs in order to secure the autographs of his heroes. He watched the final on TV at a friend’s house; afterwards he went to join the crowds in Leicester Square. On the way he encountered a group of Germans, who congratulated him. Shaking hands with them, he writes, “made it feel like the war was truly over”.