1966 оны дэлхийн аварга Английн багийн түүхэн медалиудын хувь тавилан

Sixty years on, the images and newsreels are as alluring as ever: Jack Charlton sinking to his knees in triumph, a toothless Nobby Stiles dancing a celebratory jig, Bobby Moore spotting the queen’s pristine white gloves and hurriedly wiping his sweaty palms on the lining of the Royal Box before offering her hand and accepting the Jules Rimet Trophy in return.

July 30, 1966 was English football’s greatest day. On a sun-kissed afternoon at the height of London’s Swinging Sixties, an England team rode a wave of patriotic fervour to win the World Cup for what remains the one and only time. At the final whistle, Bobby Charlton turned to his brother Jack, both of them exhausted, and said their lives would never be the same again.

But they were, more or less. Each of the 22 squad members received a £1,000 bonus from the Football Association (FA), plus a Mackintosh raincoat of their choice, but otherwise life carried on as normal.

Geoff Hurst, the hat-trick hero against West Germany in the final, went home the next day and mowed the lawn, as was his Sunday routine. His neighbour Martin Peters, the other goalscorer, went to buy a new settee. Alan Ball stopped for his usual egg and chips at a motorway service station on the drive north from London. The only difference was that a few people made a fuss and asked to see his winner’s medal, which he dutifully produced from his back pocket.

As Ball’s son Jimmy says, “That was my dad. The likes of him and Nobby, all of them, were just down-to-earth, ordinary men. They were of the people. They just got on with their lives.”

“My mum always said that when we won the World Cup, it wasn’t really that big a deal to everybody,” Stiles’s son John says. “People had watched it at home on TV, but there were no bus parades, national holidays or anything like that. Two days later the players were back at home, carrying on with their lives. My dad never went on about winning the World Cup. We just had the most normal upbringing that anyone could have.”

But from time to time, the children used to sneak upstairs for a glimpse of football history. Alan Ball kept his in his sock drawer, and Nobby Stiles kept his in a plastic bag for years, but their sons remember seeking out a red presentation box, opening it up and gazing, awe-struck, at the small gold medal inside. Roger Hunt’s son David recalls the same sense of wonder as he secretly showed his dad’s medal to his friends.

The memories of English football’s greatest day were timeless, and the medals were priceless. Nobody could ever take them away. That’s what everyone imagined back then.

For years, the boys of 66 — not just the 11 starters but the whole squad — held reunions. The men spent all day playing golf, their wives went shopping, and then in the evenings they all ate and drank together, recalling ruefully how the FA bigwigs would have frowned at such frivolity.

Over time, numbers dwindled. In 1993, almost unthinkably, Moore, the team’s captain and golden boy, was the first of them to die, aged just 51, after a battle with colon cancer. Ball died in 2007, aged 61. Then came the succession of dementia diagnoses which cruelly robbed Wilson, Stiles, Peters, Hunt, Bobby Charlton and their esteemed manager Alf Ramsey of their memories of English football’s greatest day.

In 2016, nine of the starting XI survived, but few were well enough to attend a 50th anniversary celebration at Wembley. One of them said he couldn’t see himself making it to the 60th. Over the next seven years, Ray Wilson (2018), Gordon Banks and Peters (2019), Jack Charlton and Stiles (2020), Hunt (2021), George Cohen (2022) and Bobby Charlton (2023) all died, leaving Hurst as the only surviving member of England’s World Cup-winning team.

On a spring morning in 2016, working on an article for the 50th anniversary, I knocked on the door of the cottage where Wilson and his wife Pat lived in the West Yorkshire countryside.

Wilson, who at 31 had been the oldest member of the 1966, played on for another three years at Everton, dropped down to the old Fourth Division with Oldham Athletic and Bradford City before hanging up his boots and, in need of financial security, spending the rest of his working life as an undertaker. That was the way for ex-footballers in those days: Hurst and Peters spent years working as insurance salesmen; Hunt joined his family’s haulage company.

By 2016, Wilson had long since retired. He was 81 and had been living with dementia for 12 years. He had recently discovered a sudden enthusiasm for drawing, filling page after page with creations that looked like aliens or totem poles. One of them included the caption, “I am a happy man”.

He seemed happy too, serenading his beloved Pat with an old song: “One day in May, I’ll come and say, Happy the bride that the sun shines on today.” Pat said he had suddenly started bringing her flowers, “big bunches of daffodils or bluebells from out by the reservoir”.

Every now and then, he joined the conversation. At one point he spoke in detail about how he was converted to left back as a teenager at Huddersfield Town. Then he recalled having to calm down Bobby Charlton about something on the morning of the World Cup final.

Wilson knew Bobby Moore had died, as had Alan Ball, the youngest of the World Cup-winning XI. He joked that he, the oldest member of the line-up, was going to end up outliving all of his team-mates — one of several quips that were made with a glint in his eye.

But memories of the final and its glorious aftermath were hazy, as if lying just out of reach. It was heartbreaking to think he could not remember his contribution to English football’s finest hour. But then dementia is heartbreaking on so many levels.

Wilson died in 2018, aged 81, and had already addressed his inheritance years earlier. “Ray sold everything,” his wife Pat said. “Nearly all the players did.”

He had sold his World Cup winner’s medal at auction in 2002 for a sum of £80,750. What nobody imagined at the time was that the anonymous buyer would sell it on again 12 years later for a sum of £136,000.

Pat said it wasn’t, ultimately, a financial decision. It was more a case, she said, of wishing to spare their sons the difficulty of “What are they going to do with all this when we’re gone?” “They wouldn’t have wanted to make that decision, because it was their dad’s, so we decided we would do it for them,” she said. “They both got their share.”

Nobby Stiles never wanted to sell his medals. He always planned to hand them down to his three sons. He broke down in tears when he announced in 2010 that he had no choice. “These things are very special to me,” he told reporters. “But I’ve had a bit of a hard time.”

“He hadn’t been diagnosed with dementia at that point,” his son John says. “But in the back of his mind and the back of the family’s minds, we sort of knew things were coming down the road, even if we didn’t know just how difficult it was going to be.”

A coroner ruled earlier this month that Stiles’ death in 2020, at the age of 78, was caused by high-stage chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), which in turn was linked to heading a football at least 136,000 times over the course of his 17-year playing career. His son John, also a former professional footballer, describes it as a “scandal” that the sport “killed” his father and that “so many footballers are going to continue dying in a horrible, horrible way”.

“My dad had to go into a care home for his final four years,” John says. “The cost was £125,000 a year. If he hadn’t had those medals to sell, he and my mum would have been in dire straits.”

At an auction in late 2010, Stiles’ 1966 medal sold for £160,000. The buyer was his former club Manchester United, who bought nine other lots of his memorabilia to exhibit in their museum at Old Trafford.

Mark Wylie, the museum’s curator between 1991 and 2023, told reporters the acquisition was a rare opportunity for such precious, historic items to be displayed in a museum “rather than at home in a loft or a private collection which no one can see”.

The first England player to put his World Cup winner’s medal up for sale was left back Cohen in the summer of 1998. With a heavy heart, he explained that, after an extended period of ill health, his earnings from football — and subsequently from property development — were not enough for him to look after his family in retirement.

Cohen’s medal was expected to fetch in excess of £80,000, but bidding fell short of the £60,000 reserve price.

At that point, his former club Fulham came forward and offered Cohen £80,000 for it. It has been on display at Craven Cottage ever since.

After Moore’s death, his loved ones were left with a dilemma over what to do with his medals, jerseys, caps and other memorabilia.

In the summer of 2000, his former club West Ham United paid a sum in the region of £1.45million for 79 items in his collection, of which the most precious was his 1966 medal. Terry Brown, the club’s chairman at the time, said the acquisition would honour Moore’s memory and “help future generations understand what a magnificent player he was”.

Hurst sold his medal to West Ham for a reported £150,000 in 2012. He told The Athletic in 2024 that he did so not out of necessity but because, like Wilson, he felt it would be impossible to divide his memorabilia among his daughters. West Ham also bought Peters’ medal around the same period for an undisclosed sum. For a time, all three World Cup medals were displayed in a small museum area at Upton Park.

But even before West Ham relocated from Upton Park to London Stadium in 2016, the museum had closed, and the medals were in storage. Moore’s widow Stephanie said in “Bobby Moore: The Man In Full”, published in 2014, that he would have been “appalled” had he known his treasured medals would be locked away in a vault. But 12 years later, 10 years on from the move to London Stadium, there is still no public display.

A West Ham spokesman says the three medals have been displayed in temporary exhibitions at various points, but they remain in storage for security purposes. He adds that discussions are continuing over how best to archive and showcase these “important parts of the club’s heritage”.

For years, it was Alan Ball’s most prized possession. But over time the relationship changed. “I remember asking him how he felt about it,” his son Jimmy says. “He said, ‘I won it. No one can ever change that. I don’t need a lump of gold sitting in my sock drawer to tell me I won it.’”

Ball’s outlook changed around the time his wife Lesley was diagnosed with breast cancer. He did everything possible to make her final years more enjoyable. “They travelled to Australia for some alternative treatment, to try to prolong her life, and they did some amazing things together, which we as a family were all absolutely in agreement with,” Jimmy says.

Alan Ball died in 2007, aged 61, three years after Lesley, his childhood sweetheart. He had sold his medals and memorabilia in 2005, saying they were “just trinkets that take up space” and that he hadn’t looked at them in years. His World Cup winner’s medal alone fetched £164,800, bought by the businessman and philanthropist Eddie Davies, who was Bolton Wanderers’ owner at the time.

But after Davies died in 2018, Ball’s medal went on sale at auction again. This time it was bought by an anonymous bidder for £252,000. His red No 7 shirt from the final fetched a further £164,000.

Alan Ball sold his World Cup medal (Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images)

There is a similar story involving Banks, the 1966 team’s great goalkeeper. Banks sold his medal in 2001, with an anonymous telephone bidder agreeing to pay £124,750, a record price for a football medal at the time.

Earlier this year, six years after Banks died at the age of 81, his World Cup winner’s medal went on sale again with a reserve price of £220,000. It didn’t sell, falling just short of the reserve price, and the vendor is said to be assessing his options. But even so, the increase in the price increase felt significant.

“It has almost doubled in value,” says David Convery, the head of sporting memorabilia and collectables at Budds. “The market is the best there has ever been in terms of football memorabilia. It’s the 60th anniversary, it’s a World Cup year, and the reality is that England haven’t won it again since, and there are only 11 of these medals out there.

So why do the buyers sell? “They come around again from time to time because collectors realise, like a lot of the players realised, that you can’t take them with you and you can’t divide them. Some of these guys might think, ‘I’ve owned it, I’ve had that privilege, time to move it on.’”

Jimmy Ball had no issue with his father’s medal being sold on again. “Once it’s gone, it’s gone, and it’s someone else’s to do as they please with it,” he says.

But he is not alone in feeling a sadness that several of them are now kept hidden away in vaults, unloved, gathering dust, until they are to be sold on again. He wonders why clubs and the football authorities, with all the wealth in the game, could not have bought the players’ medals and shirts “and put them on show for the fans because they deserve to be on display somewhere”.

That sentiment is echoed by Nigel Wray, a multi-millionaire investment banker who, as well as being the former chairman of Nottingham Forest and the Saracens rugby union club, owns one of the world’s largest collections of sporting memorabilia.

Items in The Priory Collection, housed at Saracens, range from the vest worn by Czech long-distance runner Emil Zatopek when he won triple gold at the 1952 Summer Olympics to the last cricket bat used by the legendary W.G. Grace — and Wilson’s World Cup winner’s medal, for which Wray paid far more in 2014 than Wilson had got for it 12 years earlier.

“It’s the only one (1966 medal) I’ve got,” Wray says. “If you were to look at it in the cold light of day, it’s pretty unspectacular, like many of these items — cricket bats, shirts, medals — are.

“But I revere these things. It’s about what they represent: moments in time, pieces of history. I think it’s a great shame there isn’t a national sports museum where all of this stuff could be held. There are various museums, various collections, and my intention is for this collection to stay together long after I’ve gone. I couldn’t bear to think it would be sold off and go into the four winds.”

Of the 11 winner’s medals awarded to England’s players in 1966, only three remain unsold. They are those belonging to Jack and Bobby Charlton and Hunt.

“My dad always used to say it would be mine one day,” Hunt’s son David says. “At one time we used to have it in a cabinet at home. I used to have my friends around, and we would get it out and have a look at it.”

What is it like? “It’s very small, only about that big,” he says, his thumb and index finger less than two inches apart. “It’s gold — but not shiny gold. It’s just like a normal medal. You wouldn’t think you were looking at something worth that kind of money.”

Whereas other players struggled with life after football, Hunt’s family’s haulage business brought a measure of security. It wasn’t an affluent existence, but nor did he suffer the hardships of some of his team-mates. He sold other items relating to his playing career with Liverpool and England, but he was determined to keep the World Cup medal in the family.

Long before Hunt died, he had decided the best place for it was at Liverpool’s museum. Bobby Charlton and his family made a similar arrangement with Manchester United, where his medal is displayed alongside Stiles’s.

“We keep it at Liverpool so that people can see it,” David Hunt says. “And we can go any time, and they’ll unlock it for us so we can see it that way.

“It’s better than having it here. And we’re going to put something in writing so that, when I’m gone, it stays in the family and it stays at Liverpool. I don’t want us ever to have to sell it.”

That is exactly how John Charlton felt after his father Jack died in 2020. “My dad and my uncle Bobby were fortunate they didn’t have to sell theirs,” he says. “My dad always said it would be mine. My sister would get my mum’s jewellery, my brother would get the property, and I would get my dad’s shirt and his medal from 1966.

“But I’ve had to give it back to my mum.”

Why?

“Because the tax people want to charge us a fortune in inheritance tax for it.”

It’s true. HM Treasury, the UK government’s economic and finance ministry, declines to comment on individual tax affairs but confirms that, whereas there are inheritance tax exemptions for some medals for service to the country, these only apply to those medals awarded by the state or Crown. Sporting medals, such as a World Cup winner’s medal or an Olympic medal, are classed as being “often a reflection of private endeavour” and are therefore classed as private assets.

Jack Charlton’s son has had to give his medal back to his mother (Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

John Charlton calls it a “disgrace”. He has spent the past two years corresponding with HM Revenue & Customs, arguing that playing for one’s country, helping England win the World Cup for the one and only time, could not possibly be considered a “private endeavour”. It remains to be seen whether prospective reforms to the inheritance tax law could bring some kind of resolution.

“What are we meant to do?” he says. “They say it’s worth £200,000. But the gold value is hardly anything. The only reason it’s worth anything is because of what it represents. That’s its sale value, but we don’t ever want to sell it.”

So where is the medal now? “My mum has got it locked away, with his shirt from the final,” John says. “I’m still trying to find out what we can do. We want to keep it in the family, which is what my dad always wanted.”

When Spain won the World Cup earlier this month, all 26 members of their squad were presented with a gold medal, as were coach Luis de la Fuente and numerous members of his backroom. For the first time in the tournament’s history, the winning squad will also be awarded a limited-edition “champions ring”, made of 18-carat gold, encrusted with 89 pave diamonds and 36 sapphires.

Lamine Yamal and his multi-millionaire team-mates are unlikely to be in a position where they ever have to consider selling their medals — or even those garish rings. Many of today’s football stars achieve financial security while still in their teens, like Yamal. They will not find themselves working as undertakers or selling insurance to make ends meet. (Selling cryptocurrency, perhaps, but that is a totally different dynamic.)

The contrast with 1966 could hardly be more marked. In those days, only the 11 players in the starting line-up were awarded medals. It was another 43 years before FIFA commissioned medals for the “forgotten” players from victorious squads between 1930 and 1974. That extended to managers, with Sir Alf Ramsey’s medal awarded posthumously to his family.

The great Jimmy Greaves received his medal in 2009. When he sold it at auction for £44,000 five years later, he was criticised in some quarters, but his health was deteriorating. Over the years that followed, before he died in 2021, he and his family faced spiralling care costs, as Stiles did.

The medal felt like an afterthought anyway. He had not been among those campaigning for England’s “forgotten heroes” to receive medals. After he lost his place in the team due to injury, 1966 was a bittersweet memory — much more bitter than sweet. In an interview with the BBC in 1981, he said he felt like “the loneliest man in Wembley Stadium that particular day”.

In 1981 Jimmy Greaves movingly told Ian Wooldridge how it felt not to play in the World Cup Final in 1966.#RIPJimmyGreaves #JimmyGreaves pic.twitter.com/t6tQSFfT6R

— BBC Archive (@BBCArchive) September 20, 2021

But even looking beyond Greaves, the stories from 1966 evoke a certain sadness. A common feeling among their surviving relatives is that the players from English football’s true golden generation were never really looked after — by the FA, by the football industry, by the political establishment — the way they should have been.

There are so many elements to that: those £1,000 bonuses, which they heard were less than their West German opponents received as runners-up; working conditions, not least the risk of head trauma; the unwillingness to usher the World Cup winners into coaching or other post-playing roles the way other associations and clubs in other countries did; the way were paraded like heroes when the FA wanted to trumpet their greatest hour but largely ignored otherwise, “put out to pasture”, as Jimmy Ball puts it; the lack of support when they suffered ill health and in some cases severe financial hardship.

In that context, the stories of the medals — most of them sold under financial duress, some of them displayed in museums but others hidden away from the public eye, either indefinitely or pending some kind of resolution with the tax authorities — take on an allegorical feel.

With every passing year, with every failed World Cup campaign, the mystique of 1966 grows, as does the scarcity value of those medals. But so too does the feeling that the heroes of English football’s greatest day were let down, forgotten, left alone with just their medals and memories until they could cling onto them no more.

The medals — where are they now?

Gordon Banks (died 2019): sold his medal to an anonymous bidder for £124,750 via auction in 2001. The medal went on sale again this month, but the £220,000 reserve price was not met. The vendor is assessing his options.

George Cohen (died 2022): the first player to put his medal up for auction in 1998. Bidding did not meet the £60,000 reserve price, but it was bought by Fulham for £80,000 and is now on display at Craven Cottage

Jack Charlton (died 2020): left his medal to his son John when he died in 2021. HM Treasury has told John he faces a large inheritance tax if he is to own it

Bobby Moore (died 1993): his medal was part of a collection of memorabilia sold to his former club West Ham United for a reported £1.4million. It was showcased in their museum at Upton Park but has been kept in storage since the club moved to London Stadium in 2016

Ray Wilson (died 2018): sold his medal to an anonymous bidder for £80,750 in 2002. It was resold at auction in 2014, bought by former Nottingham Forest chairman Nigel Wray for £136,000. It is now part of Wray’s “Priory Collection” of sporting memorabilia

Alan Ball (died 2017): his medal was bought by Bolton Wanderers’ then-owner Eddie Davies for £164,800 in 2005. After Davies died in 2018, the medal was bought for £252,0000 in 2022 by an anonymous bidder.

Nobby Stiles (died 2020): his medal is on display at Manchester United’s museum at Old Trafford. The club bought it from their former player for £166,000 at auction in 2010

Martin Peters (died 2019): West Ham bought his medal for a six-figure sum. It is now in storage with Moore’s.

Bobby Charlton (died 2023): his medal is still owned by his family but is on loan to Manchester United’s museum

Geoff Hurst: West Ham United bought his medal from him in 2012 for a reported £150,000. It is in storage

Roger Hunt (died 2021): his family still owns the medal, which is on display at Liverpool’s museum