After the lord mayor's show: what ITV did after the Premier League breakaway
The Football League and ITV found both found themselves bereft after the Premier League breakaway of 1992.
Among the celebrations marking the 30th anniversary of the formation of the Premier League last year, little attention was paid to those left behind. The twenty biggest clubs had cast off the shackles of these losers and were set on a path toward a brave new world of satellite television money, squad numbers and referees in green shirts. It was, they literally said, "a whole new ball game." History is written by the winners. They started before a ball had been kicked.
But what of the losers in all of this? The Football League puffed their chests out and announced that their First Division would remain their First Division, and that the huge ornate trophy traditionally given to the champions of England would now go to the winners of the second tier instead. But the League had at least been given considerable warning of the fissure that was to tear apart in the summer of 1992 and was at least prepared for it. One of the broadcasters certainly wasn't.
The biggest single irony of the formation of the Premier League was that it was all ITV's idea in the first place. As the weekend-only London contractor for ITV, London Weekend Television had been the main controllers of ITV sport since they first went on air in 1968, and by the end of the 1980s their head Greg Dyke wanted an aggressive expansion of the ITV network's sports coverage.
This had not always been the case. Football's first forays into televised football had been tentative, with a brief foray into live broadcasting in 1960 which lasted for precisely one match before being scrapped. What came in its place was patchwork. The first ITV companies to sign agreements to broadcast weekly highlights were Anglia and Tyne-Tees in 1962. Other companies followed. Then the BBC, keen to show off their shiny new UHD service on BBC2 and get some regular practice at covering matches ahead of the 1966 World Cup finals, pitched in with Match of the Day in 1964.
Such was the scope of the 1966 World Cup finals—this was the first World Cup that could be broadcast live around the world—that the BBC and ITV had to collaborate, but that spirit of collaboration. It was a convoluted process, how London Weekend Television (LWT) came into being, but part of their application to take over the London weekend franchise from August 1968—it was considered that a single London ITV company seven days a week would hold simply too much control over the rest of the network—was a plan to overhaul their sporting output.
World of Sport, which had been produced since 1965 by one of the outgoing franchisees, was maintained and given a lick of paint. And at the heart of their plans was football. The Big Match launched on LWT in 1968 with Brian Moore hosting and commentating and Jimmy Hill, who'd been poached from Coventry City a year earlier to act as their Head of Sport, offering expert analysis.
Almost immediately, it made Match of the Day look like a dusty relic from a bygone age even though it was only four years old in 1968. Moore was an avuncular host and, for quite a few years, a shrieky commentator, and while Hill's punditry looks rudimentary to modern eyes, it was unlike anything seen before. The Big Match was also unashamedly middle-brow. Moore would often open with a lede at the top of the show, sometimes before the opening titles. As it was shown on a Sunday afternoon, it felt in line with the coverage of the Sunday newspapers of the time.
The first signs of ructions between the BBC and ITV came in 1974, when Hill abruptly jumped ship and joined the BBC to host Match of the Day to replace David Coleman, who hadn't been completely comfortable as that show's anchor since taking it over with their Big Match-chasing revamp in 1970.
The big outrage came in November 1978, when it was announced, quite out of the blue, that the Football League had signed an exclusive contract for highlights with ITV. There was uproar. "Snatch Of The Day!", bellowed the tabloids. Questions were asked in parliament. Under Michael Grade, the nephew of ITV founding member Sir Lew, LWT were moving aggressively on Saturday evenings with an entire night of light entertainment with Bruce Forsyth. Bringing football exclusively to ITV would be the cherry on their middle-brow, Saturday night cake.
Eventually, it was agreed that this hadn't exactly followed anything much like due process and the BBC were brought back into the fold. But ITV had scored one huge win. Their next four-year contract from 1979 to 1983 would see them alternating Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons with the BBC. With Saturday nights bringing in far higher audiences than Sunday afternoons, ITV had significantly upgraded their hand with this. Bruce’s Big Night, on the other hand, crashed and burned throughout the closing months of 1978, ending after just twelve episodes.
The exclusive contract was finally signed in 1988, a four-year deal between ITV and the Football League for exclusive live coverage worth £44m. Live League matches had arrived in 1983 (ITV were first again, with a match between Spurs and Nottingham Forest), and despite a row which prevented any football from being shown for the first half of the 1985/86 season, rights remained shared until this point.
ITV's exclusive contract with the Football League was a clear pattern, and it's not difficult to see the similarity between the commercial broadcasters and the governing body. Both were formed from what we might call the 'merchant' class, professional football clubs in the 1870s and commercial broadcasters in the 1950s. And both had an 'establishment' rival. In the case of ITV, the BBC, and in the case of the Football League, the Football Association. When ITV picked up Football League exclusivity in 1988, so did the BBC with the FA Cup.
But that 1988-1992 contract wasn't popular. As a commercial broadcaster with one and a half eyes on the size of their audience and its knock-on effect on advertising revenues, they stuck rigidly to the 'Big Five' of the time; Manchester United, Liverpool, Everton, Arsenal and Spurs. One fanzine of the time went so far as to call itself "Liverpool are on the tele again." And this bias would come to have ramifications.
We all know what happened next. Sky Sports "blew them out of the water" on the advice of Alan Sugar to Rupert Murdoch. That Sugar was not only the chairman of Tottenham Hotspur but also the retailer of the very satellite dishes of which Sky were hoping to sell millions was surely only a coincidence.
While it's easy to paint Sky Sports as the villains of this piece over their hijacking of the national game, the full story is somewhat more mixed. Premier League clubs still needed to vote on which offer to accept, and things weren't quite as straightforward as, "who's writing the biggest cheque?" Clubs had existing arrangements with sponsors to protect, and furthermore what the rivals were offering was somewhat different to each other.
ITV essentially wanted more of the same. More matches, of course, but ultimately it all came down to the Big Five. But even with a couple of non-Big Five members on board, Sky Sports were offering more. They wanted matches on Sundays and Mondays and were offering a more equitable division of the matches that they'd show. When Sugar jumped ship, it was the final nail in the coffin of their bid.
And just as predictably, this division based on class lines showed itself again. The Football Association could have stopped it all from happening by refusing to sanction the Premier League, but they didn't. Sensing an opportunity to strike a decisive blow in their more than 100 years of enmity with the Football League, they nailed their flag firmly to the Premier League's mast, even lending it their name for its first couple of seasons.
The BBC, meanwhile, could never justify even pretending to be able to spend hundreds of millions of pounds on live Premier League rights, but they could twist that knife a little further by agreeing a rights package for highlights on a Saturday night. For the previous four years, Match of the Day had been limited to international matches and FA Cup weekends only. But with its return to league action in 1992 came a degree of goodwill for Sky (who were under no obligation to even offer such a package but who understood the power of marketing) and an obvious hook for this "whole new ball game" as a bastion of the traditions of the game.
The biggest irony of all of this was that the ten years which followed it were a golden period for ITV football. Under different circumstances, their coverage for the remainder of the 1990s might have been held up as an object lesson in how a regional network can integrate successfully with a football league structure.
Because the history of this had been... patchy, to put things mildly. Football is expensive to broadcast, and the reasons for this aren't always immediately obvious. Outside broadcasting comes with a host of complications, not least of which are the weather and the light. Television cameras require a certain level of light which some floodlights cannot match to this day, while clubs weren't always prepared for (or even welcoming towards) this revolution.
They weren't making any money off it (Anglia's 1962 deal for the rights to thirty matches' worth of highlights cost them the princely sum of £1,000), and many fretted that attendances which had been falling since 1950 could tumble further if some decided to stay at home and watch matches rather than actually attend them. (If anything, the last forty years have, if anything, proved the opposite - the more matches are on live television, the bigger match-going attendances seem to get.)
Furthermore, ITV companies were not all built equal. The likes of the London contractors were many times the size of their smaller brethren, and everybody had obligations to the network. The technology required to record matches was expensive, all the more so when it needed to be portable, and smaller companies were unable to afford fleets of these Outside Broadcast Units, which became a significant issue if they had to cover, say, horse racing for World of Sport at the same time on a Saturday afternoon as they might have been wanting to be at a football match too. Chopping and changing, and borrowing the resources of others, became part and parcel of life.
As such, some of the smaller companies would frequently buy in The Big Match from LWT. With its move to Saturday nights in August 1980, it became more 'national' in outlook. The variations in quality between ITV's regional company output had been striking. As late as the 1970s, Shoot! on Tyne-Tees Television showed highlights of one match only, regardless of whether it had been entertaining, and still lacked the capacity to show slow-motion action replays. The 1979 to 1983 contract certainly made some of the smaller companies up their game.
In the summer of 1992, ITV and the Football League found themselves pushed back into each other's arms again. Sky Sports and the BBC had taken the crown jewels. ITV and the Football League signed a four-year contract for substantially less money than they might have hoped for just a few weeks earlier and tried to make the best of it.
The history of football on ITV had already been through substantial peaks and troughs, from the live match disaster of 1960 to the reinvention of The Big Match and ITV's innovative and contentious coverage of the 1970 World Cup finals. But by 1992, this reputation for excellence had taken something of a battering. The Big Match, the very definition of broadcasting modernity in 1968, had a colour palette of beige and oatmeal by the early 1980s, and was adorned with a hideous logo.
And as the decade continued, things didn't really improve. Having gained that exclusivity to live Football League matches in 1988, not only did ITV only focus on a small number of clubs, but there was also something fundamentally perfunctory about their coverage. They would frequently only rock up to the ground with their new show The Match five to fifteen minutes before kick-off, with 'analysis' often limited to asking Jimmy Greaves who he thought would win.
There was no centralised weekly highlights show, so while some regions ensured that something went out every week, others would be less diligent, with goal round-ups during the live broadcasts being a viewer's safest bet for the rest of the First Division action. Supporters of three quarters of the clubs in the division only had a realistic chance of seeing their team on the television if they were playing one of the Big Five. Every once in a while a “Granada Soccer Night” or a “The London Match” could sneak their way into local schedules, but coverage was inconsistent.
1992 brought other changes, too. World of Sport had ended in September 1985. LWT’s 1968 sports coverage revolution had brought a Saturday lunchtime preview segment to it called On The Ball, at first presented by Brian Moore and later by Ian St John with his comedic foil, Jimmy Greaves. These two survived the cull of 1985 as a standalone show called Saint & Greavsie along with the full-time results service. Neither survived the summer of 1992.
Both St John and Greaves would stay with ITV, St John primarily as a presenter and Greaves as a pundit, as ITV moved uncertainty into a football landscape that they didn’t seem to have anticipated. The Football League deals—£40m over four years for between sixty and seventy regionalised live matches from the Football League, as well as the League Cup for £24m over the same period—were clearly a consolation, though in many respects they were better suited to ITV’s regional structure.
And that structure felt surprisingly similar. Brian Moore was commentating on LWT, Gerry Harrison on Anglia, Roger Tames on Tyne-Tees, John Helm on Yorkshire, Roger Malone and Hugh Johns on HTV. A handful had left—Martin Tyler for BSB in 1990 and Clive Tyldesley for the BBC, though he would later return—but it felt familiar and in the regions where companies made the commitment it worked well.
But again, the application was uneven. In the north-west of England, Granada Television only had one representative in Division One (as the League continued to insist upon calling their top division), Tranmere Rovers, for the 1992/93 season and they only showed them three times. Compare that with LWT, who showed 23 games live every Sunday afternoon throughout almost the entire season.
In 1994 it was joined by its errant younger son, Football League Extra, a weekly round-up show usually hosted by Gabriel Clarke and broadcast well after midnight on the Monday night after a weekend’s matches, featuring highlights, all the goals from the three remaining divisions of the League, features and occasionally some goals from an old match. Watching episodes back from its golden period between 1994 and 1996 now is like dipping into a hot bath of distilled mid-1990s. The show would go on to run for a full decade under a variety of different guises, and its successor, mystifyingly called The Championship, since it showed all three divisions, ran until 2009.
The problem was that, while the regional structure of ITV was well-matched to the Football League’s geographical diversity, the broadcaster’s regional structure had already been fundamentally undermined. The Broadcasting Act 1990 had already changed the process of winning one of these valuable licences from an application and assessment process into an auction subject to some dubious “quality threshold” rules.
This Act also removed rules preventing one ITV company from owning another. At first, each ITV company could only own one other, but these rules changed as the decade wore on, and in 2002 the network disappeared once and for all, subsumed into ITV plc after several years of stand-off between Granada and Carlton, the two companies who ended up owning almost all of it., following a merger. The truth is that regional television was on its way out from 1990 on, an inevitable long-term consequence of the change in law.
But although most missed it in all the excitement about this new-fangled Premier League in 1992, ITV did also maintain some very important other rights that summer. UEFA had converted their European Cup into the UEFA Champions League, and ITV were first to pick up this new competition (along with the UEFA Cup), which would grow enormously in scale and popularity as the decade progressed.
Those midweek nights under the floodlights at Old Trafford, Camp Nou and the like turned out to form many of the defining football moments of the 1990s, all ultimately building up to Clive Tyldesley shrieking into the microphone as Ole Gunnar Solskjaer stabbed the ball over the goal-line and gave Manchester United one of European football’s great comebacks and their first European Cup in 31 years. And it turned out to be an extremely durable agreement. ITV finally lost the rights to the Champions League to BT Sport in 2018, after 26 years.
And perhaps 1999 was as good as it got. ITV won the rights to Premier League highlights in 2001 and promptly made a hash of them. Their first episodes of The Premiership, featuring Des Lynam past his prime and Andy Townsend in the back of a lorry outside grounds analysing matches with players—why yes, yes it was called The Tactics Truck—are a genuine nadir in the history of football broadcasting in the UK. That contract went back to the BBC quick sharp in 2004 and hasn’t returned since. Every time there’s talk that ITV might revive their interest in trying to wrest those highlights rights from the BBC, The Premiership rears its head again like the candyman.
In 2023, it’s a strange old mixture. The FA Cup returned to them in 2021 in a joint deal with the BBC which saw the whole tournament on free television for the first time since 1988. EFL and League Cup highlights returned in the summer of 2022, though coverage has been lacklustre, with ITV deciding on their own styling rather than the popular Colin Murray-hosted show which had previously been broadcast on both Channel Five and Quest. The decision to lop half an hour off the show in the second year of their contract hardly inspired confidence, either.
But even so, it was announced as recently as the 18th September that ITV had won the rights to 20 games across England’s qualifiers for the UEFA 2024 European Championships, the 2022-23 UEFA Nations League, and every international friendly. In an age when it is becoming increasingly accepted that television will never again be the cultural power that it was during the 20th century, one thing that can keep broadcasters going is event watching, and live sport is one of the few televisual events left capable of bringing in a multi-million audience. This is why they can’t keep away from it in the first place.