If the unveiling of a handsome statue of Duncan Edwards in Dudley this week represented one admirable dimension of English football, the storm of bile that broke over Arsène Wenger’s head following his club’s home defeat by Olympiakos on Tuesday provided a brusque reminder of the changes inflicted on the English game in the past 50-odd years. The appetite of today’s media, both traditional and social, requires feeding with a diet of ever more volatile narratives.

While José Mourinho and Brendan Rodgers joined Wenger among the week’s targets, Louis van Gaal and Manuel Pellegrini were granted a respite that will probably turn out to be brief. The salaries and bonuses awarded to these managers make it impossible to feel sorry for them, but even when the criticisms are patently justified there is something not quite civilised about the vehemence of the abuse. Perhaps football is simply fulfilling its role of mirroring the society in which it exists, displaying variations of the morbid symptoms associated with an increasing gap between rich and poor.

But there is nothing new about supporters’ disappointment turning to anger. It is almost 60 years since Peter McParland of Aston Villa received death threats provoked by his shoulder charge on Ray Wood, the Manchester United goalkeeper, in the 1957 FA Cup final. That is one of the many interesting things we learn from a new book, The Heyday of the Football Annual, devoted to a study of the large-format volumes often found beneath Christmas trees in the postwar decades: Charles Buchan’s Soccer Gift Book, the Topical Times Football Book, the Big Book of Football Champions, the Eagle Football Annual, the Sportsview Book of Soccer, and so on.

In the pre-digital age, these volumes were edited to deadlines falling months ahead of their publication date, which meant that there could be no question of taking recent results into account. Instead the compilers concentrated on personality pieces and background features. Much of this content, amusingly trivial at the time, now justifies the new book’s claim to see in their pages “a history lesson and a cultural studies course rolled into one”.

Who could not be beguiled by the revelation that, on his trips abroad as a midfield enforcer for Manchester United and England, Nobby Stiles collected miniature dolls in national costume? Elsewhere we are reminded that Johnny Haynes kept budgerigars and learn of the coin collection assembled by Chelsea’s Ian Hutchinson, the balletomania of West Brom’s Graham Williams, the enthusiasm for growing chrysanthemums developed by Everton’s Eddie Wainwright, and the poodle-breeding hobby of the Southampton winger Terry Paine, another notorious hard man.

Trevor Hockey, Birmingham City’s energetic midfielder of the late 60s, is pictured at home, playing folk songs on his guitar beneath posters for concerts by Julie Felix and Bert Jansch. Barry Bridges, the Chelsea centre-forward, poses for the photographer while changing the bedding and sweeping the steps of the Eastbourne hotel he has just taken over in partnership with his father-in-law.

There is fun – including a report of Millwall spooked into conceding an equaliser by the mere sight of the legendary defender Harry Cripps, their former team-mate, rising from the Charlton bench and removing his tracksuit – and there is seriousness. In 1969, with hooliganism spreading a stain across English football, the pages of David Coleman’s World of Football hosted a debate on the problem between the Methodist minister, socialist and pacifist Lord Soper and Denis Howell, the sports minister (and a qualified referee).

Tactics, too, were given proper consideration. Had Matt Busby and his players read the advice on “How to Crack ‘Catenaccio’” offered to the readers of the 1968 International Football Book by Kurt Hamrin, they might not have succumbed to the Swedish winger and his Milan team-mates the following spring while attempting to defend the European Cup.

Sometimes hindsight undermines the analysis. The same 1968 edition of the International Football Book contained no fewer than nine pages examining the “third man theory” of defending as employed by Helenio Herrera at Internazionale, Bela Guttmann at Benfica, Albert Batteux at Stade de Reims and Saint-Étienne, and Ron Greenwood at West Ham, leading the IFB’s anonymous author to draw the obvious conclusion: “On the pattern elsewhere, it would therefore seem safe to predict that West Ham will win not one but several Football League championships in the next few years.”

Almost every page contains an invitation to compare and contrast past with present, and sometimes to engage in an argument. Photographs of the appalling winter conditions in which matches still went ahead are accompanied by a remark from one of the contemporary voices used sparingly throughout the text: “Imagine Agüero in slush like that today!” Actually, you can quite easily visualise the little Argentinian thriving in a penalty-area quagmire, as Ian St John or even Jimmy Greaves once did.

But there can be no arguing with the verdict on the England team given by the Sportsview Soccer Book in 1963, after a poor showing at the World Cup in Chile was followed by defeats at the hands of France and Scotland: “The old familiar words like shambling, fumbling, stereotyped and disjointed were dusted out and brought back into use. [But] the real reason we trail so far behind other countries is because our players are not able to pass with anything like the consistency, accuracy and technique of the players from other countries.” Equally true 10 years earlier, when the Hungarians handed out lessons that went unheeded, the judgment remains valid more than 50 years later.

The book’s design mimics the look of the originals, which varied from brash to stylish. A highlight comes with the double-page spread reproducing a layout from Charles Buchan’s 1954-55 annual, devoted to a remarkable aerial photograph of Hampden Park. Taken during the Scottish Cup semi-final between Celtic and Motherwell in March 1954, it shows not just the handsome grandstands and packed open terraces – originally laid out by the great stadium architect Archibald Leitch, a Glasgow man – but the packed car parks and the typical postwar sight of a small compound of prefabricated bungalows just beyond the perimeter.

Six years later this would be the setting for one of the greatest football matches ever played: the European Cup final between Real Madrid and Eintracht Frankfurt, an occasion of such lustre and significance that it looms not only over this excellent book but over the whole of modern football, a reference point for a game whose essentials, including England’s deficiencies, remain resistant to change.

The Heyday of the Football Annual by Ian Preece and Doug Cheeseman (Constable, £19.99)