Chancellor Gordon Brown has said this week that he supports the idea of a Great Britain football team taking part in the Olympics.

The Olympic Games now have football tournaments for both men and women. Whether a British team is to be entered for either tournament in 2012 is still under discussion.

Great Britain's last Olympic football match was played 36 years ago. A men's team managed by Charles Hughes and administered by The FA - with the agreement of the Scottish, Welsh and Irish FAs - entered the qualifiers for the Munich Games of '72 and were drawn to play a two-leg tie against Bulgaria.

In those days the Olympics were for amateur sportsmen. Our football team had players from top amateur clubs like Enfield, Hendon and Slough Town. Only one non-English player made the starting line-up, a Scottish centre-half from Albion Rovers.

Officially Bulgaria didn't have professional footballers, so they were able to field what was virtually their World Cup side. They turned up at Wembley expecting to see Charlton, Moore and Banks and a crowd of 100,000!

In fact, on a very cold evening in March 1971, only about 3,000 saw Great Britain's amateurs achieve an almost unbelievable 1-0 win with Joe Adams' 15th-minute effort. But in the second leg in Sofia, watched by 30,000, the home side gained a comprehensive 5-0 victory.

Before the next Olympics, in Montreal in 1976, the FA Council had abolished the official distinction between amateur and professional footballers in England. Now they were all just "players" and that decision signalled the end of the FA Amateur Cup, the England Amateur Team and the Great Britain Olympic Team.

The last time we had actually qualified for the Olympic Final Tournament was for the Rome Games in 1960. We were winners way back in 1908 and 1912.