The fourth and final part of the BBC documentary in four parts, “Premier League: When football changed”, will be broadcast tomorrow, Sunday – if you missed the first three parts, you can find them on SVT Play. It’s worth the effort.
And it’s completely true: When the Premier League breaks away from the old Football League and becomes the Premier League until the 1992-93 season, well then a completely new era in football’s history begins. The film focuses on the new league’s first ten years.
You can think what you want when you see it in the rearview mirror, and with a 30-year perspective, but after that nothing really happened. Not for the clubs, not for the audience, not for the players. The entire playing field changed – even the all-Swedish football could feel the changes.
When you see Bill Fox, the then chairman of the Football League who has run the business since the days of Cromwell, at a press conference where he resignedly condemns the new league and the new era, well then the picture is extremely telling.
It is a former ruler who have seen British football go to pieces in several respects; decades of hooliganism and neglect of the arenas. British teams banned in the European Games after the disaster at Heysel Stadium in 1985 (39 dead, hundreds injured), the fire at Bradford & Bingley Stadium just a few weeks earlier (56 dead, 265 injured) and then the Hillsborough accident in 1989 (96 dead, hundreds injured).
Audience figures in the English league system had fallen dramatically for decades, and if one now sees the breakthrough of the modern European football economy as a success story with the entry of the Premier League, well then one might say that the Premier League saved English football. Of course, not everyone completely agrees with that, maybe not even about the description of how it happened and how it happened, but this is not a film about criticism, rather a film about a salvation action – and that is perhaps the weakness of the whole series. There is not much left for critical voices, so to speak.
Everyone is here who were present at the time interviewed. There are club owners, investors, marketers, coaches and players – but it is above all Sky Television and Rupert Murdoch. The satellite broadcast football will make the Premier League a global success story with horrible sums in circulation, especially when it comes to television rights around the world. It is raining money over the British clubs, soon it will be TV agreements around Europe and all over the world that control the game, when and how and between whom matches will be played.
To give you an idea of the development: Alan Shearer became one of the world’s most expensive football players when Blackburn Rovers paid £ 3.6 million before the start of the Premier League in 1992. British media took to wartime headlines. “Incredible money” had now seriously entered football. A ruin for the sport, the critics thought.
Virtually all the experts, coaches, supporters said that “no young player is worth that much money”. Time goes fast, as you know, but it is actually not that long ago.
The highest paid top players in England currently earns five million kronor – a week.
Manchester United also made a spectacular signing in the same year, 1992, when they paid one million pounds to Leeds for Eric Cantona.
The latter is of course also interviewed in the series, yes it may be easier to list those who are not from that time. Here are David Beckham, Gary Neville, Vinnie Jones, Paul Merson, Kenny Dalglish, Greame Le Saux and so on.
I spent a lot of time in the league stands in England in the 70s and 80s, especially during the second half of the 80s. It was rough, worn, gloomy, not entirely harmless – maybe a lot of the magic of the Premier League disappeared. Or it’s just sunkissed nostalgia. See for yourself.
Read more sports in TV chronicles by Johan Croneman:
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