As a new photography book celebrates the glory of 70s football, Ed Vulliamy charts his own relationship with the game, from bunking into an FA Cup final to the death of innocence at Heysel

The ivy up Wembley's outer wall held, as did the grip of my baseball boot on the pitted concrete. Precariously up and up towards the cavities that would, we presumed, lead into the bowels of the stadium, for the 1971 FA Cup final, Liverpool v Arsenal. There were scores of us scaling the edifice at the Liverpool end, ticketless but intent on watching John Toshack give the cockneys a hiding; it looked like one of those mountaineering cliffs at leisure centres.

I'd hooked up with a scally from Huyton and now, 100ft above the car parks, we crawled through a deep orifice in Wembley's wall, jumped and hit the ground; my savvy partner-in-crime disappeared into the crowds like a dart, but I tarried for disastrous moment of disbelieving self-congratulation. The heavy hand of a policeman plonked abruptly on my shoulder and I spent the 90 minutes of football (and community singing of Abide With Me) in a cell on the Harrow Road, a punitive arrest without charge, unable to follow the game or its result, which was just as well.

The Age of Innocence (Taschen's new photographic tribute to football in the 70s) seems a strange title for a book about football in a decade that had begun with the Ibrox disaster that killed 66 Glasgow Rangers fans in January that year (detonating jokes from Celtic fans about orange squash) and the Kop still sang about "only one air disaster", a reference to the air crash near Munich that killed eight members of the Manchester United team in 1958 (there were 23 deaths in all). But there was an innocence, not least in the presumption by thousands of teenagers from Merseyside that one could saunter down to London and watch a cup final by bunking in.

As the Premier League prepares to kick off, again sponsored by a bank caught trying to fiddle interest rates, although no one cares, it all feels bloated compared with football in those days. The images have especial cogency in the light of what we now call Germany's "retro" football, by which we mean just sensible: fans' ownership of clubs, cheap tickets on the day, community-centred clubs and open training. This culture produces World Cup winners, while our turbo-commercial game nurtures probably the worst, albeit lavishly overpaid, national team to play in Brazil this summer.

But still we insist, a bit like Ukip or the managers of our appalling railway companies: it's England, so it must best. Thanks to the money and thanks to the foreign players that money buys for the Premier League.

And yet the innocence of the 70s was one that began with the players themselves. On one level, they were distant when it was appropriate to be so. Take this summer's World Cup hosts: in the days of stars rather than celebrities (very different concepts), the Brazilian teams at the World Cups were an assembly of beatific artists from some far-off planet of the beautiful game with names such as Jairzinho, Tostão and Socrates, who played for clubs called Botafogo and Vasco da Gama. This year, they were a bunch of familiar and mediocre millionaires from Chelsea plus a Manchester City midfielder granted licence by a referee to kick and assault the tournament's most wonderful player – James Rodriguez of Colombia – as he pleased, with impunity.

England footballers including Alan Ball, Geoff Hurst, Bobby Moore and Peter Osgood in Mexico for the World Cup tournament in May 1970. Photograph: Taschen

On another level, the players of the 1970s were familiar when they should have been be familiar. I remember going to watch a First Division game between West Ham and QPR, then returning on the Central Line with the QPR captain, Mike Keen, and two other players, Dave Clement and Roger Morgan. They signed my programme and talked about my O-levels. I doubt they earned more than a good builder for their Saturday's work – and how different now, with the Lamborghinis, agents, endorsements and sponsors. You kicked off at 3pm on Saturdays, not when Rupert Murdoch told you to.

There was a pub in Shepherd's Bush called the Crown & Sceptre (always known as the June & Jim after its landlady and landlord) at which fans would lubricate before a game, and to which Stan Bowles, the QPR superstar, would come regularly of a Sunday – and always on Christmas Eve – to spend whatever he may have had left over from the dog track. He was every bit as good as Beckham, but… call it a different approach, different time.

My sister won, in 1976, a Draw Stan Bowles competition, the prize for which was to meet Stan the Man, which she did while he was hospitalised with a leg injury; lies were written to school, hair washed and she arrived with a bunch of flowers. But even in those days, stars had an entourage: she was disappointed to find herself one of a crowd around Stan's leg in traction, mostly female, plus the bookie.

Liverpool were the team of my grandfather and mother's home town, the charismatic ancestral club, and I was always eager to catch the Kop whenever it came to London to take a stand, separated by lines of police and a no-man's-land of flying sharpened coins, from home fans in Chelsea's Shed or on Arsenal's North Bank.

But QPR were our local team in Notting Hill, and it was to watch them every other Saturday that I used to find 3s (15p) for a perch in the boys' enclosure, graduating to a 6s tariff to stand in the "Loft" as the 1970s began.

So I was a bigamist, which worked so long as Liverpool and Rangers played in different divisions, but in 1976 they were head to head for the title, settled only by Liverpool coming from behind with three goals in the last 15 minutes of a final game they needed to win, at Wolves. It was hard to take, having spent most of my university years supposedly at Oxford but in fact hitch-hiking or riding a Morris Minor around England to watch QPR, staying over in – or driving back overnight from – places such as Carlisle and Leicester, with a girlfriend in Liverpool to boot.

Straight on to the dole in the summer of 76, I was turned down by every newspaper I applied to despite a first break in journalism thanks to The Superhoop, monthly magazine of the QPR supporters' club, with a piece entitled "Light and Bitter Memories of that Final Run-in". But then I moved in not only with the girlfriend in Liverpool but the glamorous football team too, upon obtaining employment in the north-west; Granada TV from Monday to Friday, then Saturdays swaying and crushing on the Kop, watching Hughes, Dalglish and my favourite, Stevie Heighway, who also played for my national team, though not with the commitment of Johnny Giles or the great Don Givens of QPR.

Actually, it wasn't bigamy, it was polygamy: visiting and living in Italy, I'd fall carelessly in love with any team I could get to see – various phases: Juve, Napoli, Roma – even if they hated each other. Dino Zoff, Giuseppe Savoldi, Bruno Conti – it was all so goddamn GLAMOROUS and the defensive, chess-like catenaccio mattered not a fig if the game was played beneath blue sky and umbrella pines, with flares in the crowd and pitches smothered in coloured smoke.

Politics in football played both ways. Innocent it may have been, but English and Scottish football was very white compared with today's game and change to that was unwelcome to many fans. The chant "Leeds Are White!" began in the 1970s after black players began to appear in the First Division and a long time passed before they felt anything like comfortable. The decade ended in 1979 with the bizarrest of testimonials, for Len Cantello's West Bromwich Albion against an "All Blacks" team of those abused and discriminated against, corralled by Cantello's team-mate Cyrille Regis. It was a great gesture: these were days of National Front leaflets at the turnstiles, and WBA's positioning of the club on the other, anti-Nazi, side.

That was black and white; what about orange and green? It was not until 1989 that sectarian-Protestant Glasgow Rangers would sign a high-profile Catholic player, and the decade in question here between Bloody Sunday in 1972 and the H-block hunger strikes in 1981 saw the rivalry between Celtic and Rangers develop from traditional posturing into terrace and street warfare. (Even now, modern Celtic fumble and mumble, uncertain what to do with the ebullient politics of their most loyal, hardest-core fans, the Green Brigade, its Palestinian flags banned from Celtic Park.)

For football was then a valve and stage for political protest on a scale unimaginable now. The Argentinian junta's determination to turn the 1978 World Cup into its own version of the 1936 Berlin Olympics backfired entirely when the crowd at the final against Holland sang on and on in defiant mockery of General "Big Ears" Galtieri, the commentators left awkwardly speechless.

This was planet football in its age not so much of innocence as authenticity. Veritable football, trustworthy in a way that it is no longer. I think football, and the inimitable side-splitting humour that accompanies it, is often a matter of self-parody, a little healthy self-mockery, the knowledge that everything's daft really. Now top-flight football has lost not only its roots in community but also that gentle art of not taking oneself too seriously. The Glazers, Abramovichs, Qataris and John Henrys have robbed football of the twinkle in the eye.

Roy Keane's jibe about Manchester United fans who "have a few drinks and probably the prawn sandwiches, but don't realise what's going on out on the pitch" is an estimable description of today's outrageously well-heeled Premier League crowds. On the other hand, I went to watch a United reserve game recently and there were the spotty teenagers, old men in dirty suits, black kids from Moss Side. They'd have been at a first-team game in the 70s, but now that's just a theatre of in your dreams.

Even so, they may have been having a better time than the shaven-headed upper-middle-managers with the contacts and money to watch Van Gaal's team. The most fun I had at an English game recently was at Havant & Waterlooville, to find out how they had fared months after a breathtaking display at Anfield in the 2008 FA Cup – what happened to Havant? I know no fans who enjoy their football more recklessly and dottily than the rebels of FC United of Manchester (I wish Liverpool had one), Sheffield United during their out-of-character cup run last season and insurgent St Pauli of Hamburg. Very few big clubs retain that authenticity: Napoli, Celtic, plus Borussia Dortmund and Bayern for reasons we know about.

The age of innocence, such as it was, ended not really with the close of the decade but in 1985, when three of us made a trip to Brussels for what was to be a glorious night watching the two superlative teams of the 1980s, Liverpool and Juventus, square off for the European Cup. We didn't have to climb the wall of Heysel stadium: we had tickets with a grandstand view and terracing shared by Liverpool fans and "neutrals", who had actually travelled from southern Italy and were not neutral at all. A grandstand view of "our" fans charging, crushing and killing 39 innocent people, then making insidious and evasive excuses for having done so. After the horror of Hillsborough in 1989, which convulsed Liverpool fans in a deadly nightmare of their own, with all the savage irony of that, for the game as it was in these pages, any notion of an age of innocence felt as dead as the 39 plus the 96.

The English and Scottish games have since mutated, in their post-Heysel-Hillsborough after-life at top level, bloated and awash with money. Redeemed for most of us only by the experience of watching on television teams like those that graced the Brazil World Cup: gallant Chileans, Colombians, Mexicans and Algerians, whose thrilling, still-innocent, committed and attacking team football reminded us how – and how good and how much fun – it once was.

The Age of Innocence: Football in the 1970s is published by Taschen (£34.99). To buy it for £27.99 with free UK p&p call 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk