Dedicated footballers of fashion

Even now there are naked children in Africa who, on being offered one of Gazza's cast-offs, would say, "no, you're OK. Wearing that would give me a headache."

Over the years, football players have been so shockingly badly dressed off the park that calling them fashion unconscious is probably a compliment. They're more fashion comatose. The evidence?

Davie Provan's perm, Chris Waddle's mullet, Glenn Hoddle's velvet jacket, Peter Marinello's tank top (oh God, Peter Marinello's tank top), Ashley Cole's white trousers and see-through white shirt unbuttoned at the waist.

Squeeze them all together into a toxic waste skip, a big monster mush of bad hair and material so heinous it should probably come with its own restraining order and what have you got? Barry Venison probably.

But step away from the sheepskin coat and maybe it's possible to dress up the subject in more flattering outlines. "If you follow the clothes you follow the history of football," believes Paolo Hewitt.

Hewitt, is a music writer and a Tottenham fan. Back in 2006 he and Mark Baxter wrote The Fashion of Football, a book that is now the basis for an exhibition at the National Football Museum in Manchester. Strike a Pose: 50 Years Of Football And Fashion takes in the good, the bad and Kevin Keegan.

It's an inevitably English-weighted display but Scotland is represented here and there. "I tell you who we put in," Hewitt says. "Jim Baxter, because there's a photo of him in a leather coat and leather cap. He looked great."

But over and above Baxter's sartorial savoir-faire, there is, Hewitt suggests, a story of the changing nature of British football and the changing place of British footballers in it.

"The exhibition starts with the abolition of the maximum wage in 1961," he says. "By '63, '64 footballers have disposable income and that can be spent on clothes. And obviously the first flowering of that was with George Best."

Best was as much a symbol of the changing order of things in the 1960s as the Beatles and French new-wave cinema. "You look at George Best and you look at Bobby Charlton. That's new football and old football," Hewitt says.

Best was the player who cemented the idea of the footballer as pop star, as style icon. He was the player who commissioned architect Frazer Crane to build him a modernist split-level house in Bramhall. He was the player who opened an eponymous clothes store. He was the player who, shock horror, grew his hair long.

And after Best, so did everyone else. Which was a problem for managers whose social ideas were forged in the post-war years and national service. "Frank McLintock said his main memory of Bertie Mee, his manager at Arsenal, wasn't 4-4-2 and mark the centre-forward. It was collar and tie. They had to wear the club uniform."

But the genie was out of the bottle now and players such as Alan Hudson at Chelsea and Martin Chivers at Spurs were standing up to the boss. "What it leads into is players wanting more and more to take control. I was lucky enough to ghostwrite Chivers' biography and he was one of the players [Spurs manager] Bill Nicholson hated.

"Normally at the end of the season Nicholson would go, 'right, you're getting a £2 pay rise' and that would be it. Chivers would be like 'no, that's not good enough'. It was the start of player power. And it leads to the Chelsea team and the King's Road of the early 70s." The celebrity photographer (and Chelsea fan) Terry O'Neill played his part in the changing image of the footballer. "I got fed up with doing movie stars," he says of his move into sports photography during that time. "I did Peter Osgood as a fashion thing. I had a load of fun."

O'Neill even put Raquel Welch in a Chelsea kit. For the first time, footballers were not just appearing on the sports pages. They were becoming celebrities. The look was part of that, but it was also used as a psychological weapon. When Chelsea travelled north to play their great rivals Leeds they would dress up more just to wind up the locals.

Soon the managers were following suit as a new generation emerged. Malcolm Allison started wearing a fedora, Ron Atkinson flashed his jewellery. By the time we reach the 1980s everyone was dressing up. And for the most part badly. These were the Nicholas years, the nadir of football fashion.

"Which is what it was in general fashion too, " Hewitt points out. "Any time anyone talks about a badly-dressed footballer all the examples are from the 80s. Hoddle, Keegan, the mullet jacket, the badly-fitting jacket sleeves, the terrible use of colour. But look at Wham! in the 80s."

There were the odd exceptions. Black players such as Laurie Cunningham and Clyde Best drew on soul boy influences for their look, but if you wanted a real alternative you had to look to the terraces where the casuals were pioneering the tracksuit look, inspired by trips to Europe and discovering labels such as Tacchini.

"By now the fans couldn't afford what the players were wearing," Hewitt says, "And they probably didn't want to look like the players any way.

"Would you want to look like Glenn Hoddle did? Not really. But a nice tracksuit top with great trainers? This was where the trainer took off. Football is responsible for the multi-million dollar industry that's the training shoe."

By the 1990s Premier League-era players were beginning to earn huge wages and clothes were one way of displaying their conspicuous new wealth. And then there was David Beckham, who took the Best model and ran with it.

"He's always loved clothes," Hewitt said. "I take exception to the idea of the metrosexual. For hundreds and hundreds of years there have been men who are naturally interested in clothes. To them, clothes are as important as football, music or whatever. Beckham watched gangster films from an early age and at 15 he was dressing in striped suits."

And in doing so he has set in place the style of the modern footballer. "Since Beckham they've all gone 'we have to wear Armani'. A lot of them love the smart casual look, very expensive jumpers, very expensive jeans, and a lot of them look really good because they're really fit."

And so we arrive at the era of Mourinho and Mancini, Ronaldo and Balotelli. Football at the luxury end equals flash. Soccer equates with style. But in all cases it comes with a hefty price tag.

"If you were a fan of George Best in '65 you could probably dress like him," Hewitt says. "You might have had to pay them up, but you could buy the corduroy jacket, the white Levis, the polo necks. Today, if you're a fan of David Beckham you'd have to be a multi-millionaire to dress like him, which shows how football's gone."

There goes the final whistle. I'll get my Marks & Spencer coat.

Strike A Pose: 50 Years of Football & Fashion runs at the National Football Museum until August 27. A Kindle edition of Hewitt and Baxter's book The Fashion of Football is available from Amazon, priced £3.38