Rome Wasn't Built in a Day, Chapter 14; A whole new ball game

The early 1990s brought a wave of optimism around the game in England, but the biggest clubs were already planning a land grab that would change football; in this country forever.

14. A whole new ball game

Viewed through a certain prism, it was possible to argue that by the end of the 1980s football in England looked very much as it had for the previous few decades. True enough, there were now matches shown regularly on the television and the shirts had sponsor names on them, but the Football League remained very much as it had since 1958 and the introduction of the Fourth Division, with television being an adjunct of the game rather than a central part of it.

But look a little closer and it’s clear that the seeds of the vast changes that would come had been sewn years earlier. There had been talk of breakaway leagues going back decades, but these started to reach a crescendo in the mid-1980s. In September 1985, a meeting between representatives from Arsenal, Tottenham, Everton, Liverpool, Manchester United, Manchester City, Newcastle and Southampton reached some surprising conclusions.