Where do golden generations come from?

Political involvement in football dates back as far as we can remember. Even the origins of modern football are delved in political intrigue, when the inhabitants of a small east English town played a game of football with the decapitated head of a Danish prince.

In the 1950's, Real Madrid were accused of receiving special treatment from Spain's president/Caudillo, general Francisco Franco, who allegedly granted them automatic qualification to the 1955, 1956, 1957, 1958 and 1959 European cups, a participation normally granted by France Football. Real Madrid went on to win the competition 5 successive times facing little to no actual competition and bending the rules all the while. The Soviet Union's national football team was briefly accused of doping their athletes during the 1960 and 1964 European championships and 1966 FIFA world cup, FIFA officials were accused of favouritism towards the host nations of South Korea and Japan at the 2002 world cup and were shrouded in controversy once again when they awarded the 2022 world cup to the oil-rich nation of Qatar, often accused of human rights violations.

Although political intervention in association football has gone down since the days of Franco and Ponedelnik and it has shifted mostly towards financially driven interference, there is a phenomenon that has rarely been touched, the political roots of "golden generations".

A golden generation is defined as "an exceptionally gifted group of players of similar age, whose achievements reach or are expected to reach a level of success beyond that which their team had previously achieved.", the common misconception with golden generations is that they are a feat of luck or chance, but that is as far from the truth as possible. Golden generations materialise due to a range of social and political factors at the time, often overlooked by the footballing world, so I wanted to examine a few notable examples of golden generations to clarify the impact politics have on the footballing world.