Jimmy Hill, A Glowing Tribute To His Career.

I think you're absolutely right and it's definitely wrongly. To my generation Jimmy Hill was generally viewed as the out of touch old duffer who was treated as a kind of representative of a different era that didn't have a great deal to say to the present one (and that's not just a random canvassing of opinions of people my age - it's absolutely how he was portrayed in the football magazines/fanzines/youth football TV shows that we grew up with). Ie. Someone who banged on about fairplay and the corinthian spirit, the malign influence of 'foreigners' and generally sounded like his starting point remained the idea that England and English football were at the pinnacle of World Football and any evidence to the contrary (including the steady internationalisation of our top division) was just a temporary set back. It wasn't really until much later that I found out about the real Jimmy Hill through reading about the game and it makes you wonder why such a canny, intelligent man allowed himself to be caricatured in that way.  I suspect that it was at least partly deliberate - that he identified that in the modern game that was a role he could play.  In other words by simply amplifying his existing personality and perspective he filled a key role in pundit land at a time when a new generation of football people were making his generation increasingly irrelevant in most other ways.  To me, as a pundit he was a football equivalent of Geoffrey Boycott - an outstanding player who clearly had an amazing brain for his sport but yet in order to really get at those nuggets (which were/are entirely genuine) you had to put up with a load of irrelevant guff a lot of which was clearly deliberately edited in order to add 'character' to the program especially for people who were casual fans (Ie. Jimmy Hill, reassuring presence, saying what he always say etc).

But I don't think there's any doubt that Jimmy Hill shaped the modern football world more than any other single individual in English football.  If all he'd done was be the guy who abolished the maximum wage that would enough for that crown given the remarkable long term effect it has had on the game.  But, he was also responsible for revolutions in the marketing of football, the administration of football and the way football is dealt with in the media.  Whether consciously or not, I think he was one of the first people to recognise that professional football was first and foremost in the entertainment business.  So from the point of view of the players he thought they should be paid as entertainers not as sportsmen - ie. they deserved a much bigger slice of the pie because they were the talent rather than the old fashioned (the 'Amateur' FA) view of football as a sport in which players should consider themselves incredibly fortunate to get a living for the privilege playing 'their' game (ie a game run, owned and operated by the Amateur Elite out of Lancaster Gate - who utterly raked it in by the way).  Then as a manager/chairman he produced a whole series of reforms that were basically designed to make the game more fan friendly - and more from the point of view of the casual fan than the hard-core supporter (he always seemed to me quite disdainful of the average partisan football fan-I think he associated them with the darker side of the game which he saw as damaging it's credibility and marketability).  On the TV side it was the same thing - he gave viewers what they wanted to see.  Not people sitting around talking about football as if it was some kind of abstract art form but people actually talking about football the way everyone does; as an argument in a pub.  By the way that's something that desperately needs to return - football punditry has gone back to being an old boys stitch up.

So I think that's what explains Jimmy Hill ultimately - that he was one of the first people to 'get it' in that respect.  That football was a business concerned with public entertainment and that, as a bloody clever bloke and clearly a charismatic personality I think that (within the context of being very much a man of his era) he was always thinking about how he could push it more in that direction as either a 'performer' or as an impresario.  It's just that the model he had in his head was something akin to Music Hall whereas the Premiership uses the NFL.  Total one-off.  For a start I don't think someone like that would likely be a professional footballer today - I don't think the sacrifices you need to make allow footballer to gain that kind of rounded skillset and personality at the kind of age that Hill had to be such a success.  As for knighthood - I think I heard that he let it be known that he would turn it down.