Premier League: A History in Ten Matches

by Jim White

Overview

Tens of millions follow it.

It attracts the finest global talent to play in what is almost a weekly World Cup.

In just 20 years it has transformed football from national embarrassment to Britain's leading cultural export.

It offers dreams and drama, pride and passion, triumph and tears.

It is the most popular sporting contest on Earth.

It is the PREMIER LEAGUE.

Celebrating 21 years of football's most popular and prestigious competition told through 10 of the most defining matches in history.

Please note: This ebook is hand-crafted. Well not quite, but it is certainly a cut above the rest; great care has been taken to make sure it is both beautiful and highly functional.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781781854297
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	09/26/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
File size:	45 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Jim White has written for the Independent, the Guardian and the Telegraph. He is the author of MANCHESTER UNITED THE BIOGRAPHY and YOU'LL WIN NOTHING WITH KIDS.

Read an Excerpt

Premier League

A History in 10 Matches

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By Jim White

Head of Zeus Ltd

Copyright © 2013 Jim White
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78185-430-3

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CHAPTER 1

If Fergie had his way they'd still be playing

MANCHESTER UNITED V. SHEFFIELD WEDNESDAY

Old Trafford, Manchester Saturday 10 April 1993

Horatio Nelson would not have made much of a football man. I admit it would have been hard for Britain's greatest seafarer to forge any affiliation with the game, since he was fatally wounded during the Battle of Trafalgar – two decades before the first recorded instance of twenty-two young men charging around the playing fields of Shrewsbury School in pursuit of a ball, and a full fifty-eight years before the Football Association first crafted the laws of the game in a Holborn pub. But even if he hadn't been born a little too soon to spend his Saturday afternoons hopping around on the touchline, his telescope to his blind eye, moaning about the referee's eyesight, what makes it abundantly clear that the admiral had no proper sympathy for football's nuances was something he wrote in 1801, soon after his victory at the Battle of Copenhagen. 'Time is everything,' he declared. 'Five minutes makes the difference between victory and defeat.'

Anyone who knows anything about the game would quickly put him right. Certainly anyone who was in attendance on a bright Easter Saturday afternoon in Manchester in April 1993 would point out his fundamental error. It's not five minutes that makes the difference between victory and defeat, between immortality and ignominy, between winning the title and blowing it. It's six.

Such was the critical chronology that Eastertide. Six minutes: long enough to boil up some pasta. Sufficient time to risk permanent damage to your frontal lobes by listening to Psy's 'Gangnam Style' not once but twice. About the time it takes to travel on the London Underground between King's Cross and Baker Street (signals permitting), or twice as long as it would take Sir Bradley Wiggins to cover the same distance on his bike. Six minutes: the difference between the box-fresh, all-new, game-changing Premier League starting with a whimper or with a bang. It was a span that etched itself into the sporting memory of the 40,102 people who had gathered at Old Trafford for a late-season fixture between Manchester United and Sheffield Wednesday. For them, it was to prove to be six minutes that changed their supporting lives.

Looking back, there seems little about Britain in 1993 that clamours for the historian's attention. This was the second year of John Major's second term as prime minister and the country experienced twelve months that were every bit as unremarkable as the occupant of 10 Downing Street. Here's how exciting it was: 1993 was the year that VAT was first introduced, the Ford Mondeo first went into production and Fermat's Last Theorem was ultimately resolved. Not that you would have read much about all that in the British tabloids. Britain's popular press was fixated on the news that the Princess of Wales had opened divorce proceedings against her errant husband. Which, if nothing else, suggested it was unlikely she would be buying Prince Charles a copy of the year's biggest-selling pop record: Whitney Houston's 'I Will Always Love You'.

Stirrings of revolution

In football, however, a revolution was underway. Seismic change was being fomented. And English football made the most unlikely revolutionary. In 1993 the game was only recently emerging from its bleakest years, a time riven with disaster and violence. It was only four years on from the horrors of Hillsborough, in which ninety-six Liverpool fans had been killed by institutional neglect, their reputation in death, as it would some twenty-three years later be officially admitted, shamelessly sullied in order to cover up culpability among those who should have been protecting them. It was only the season before that an English team had been allowed back into the European Cup, after UEFA's blanket ban imposed as punishment for Liverpool fans' complicity in the Heysel horror of 1986. And, rather than celebrating the return, Arsenal's campaign had ended in somehow appropriate anticlimax with a second-round defeat by Benfica.

This was not English football's greatest era, it was still a sport despised by those in power. Margaret Thatcher, Major's predecessor, had considered the game a national embarrassment. Or worse. 'She was a bully who despised football,' claims Graham Kelly, the FA's general secretary during her premiership. David Mellor, the former government minister, recalls that at cabinet meetings chaired by the Iron Lady he had to conceal the fact that he followed the game. 'I'd have to sit on my hands whenever it was mentioned and keep my enthusiasm secret,' he recalls.

He wasn't the only one: Major and Michael Howard too were keen fans sitting on their hands, knowing that to admit to a footballing affiliation in the late decades of the twentieth century was to court disdain. Even outside Conservative political circles, being a football fan was not something to boast about. I recall being at a social function in the late 1980s when, during a lull in conversation, I asked if anyone had seen Match of the Day the previous week. It was an enquiry greeted with curled lips. Apparently, I was informed by another guest, it was not an appropriate thing to talk about. When the evening ground to a halt (unlike football, there's only so much to be said about house prices) I was approached on the way out by a chap who had been sitting opposite me but said nothing when I raised the pariah subject. 'I saw Match of the Day,' he confided, in a conspiratorial whisper. 'I just didn't like to say.'

How things have changed. Nowadays, an association with football – however tangential – is reckoned the best way to demonstrate a common touch, of showing that you are a regular guy. In Britain in the second decade of the twenty-first century, those seeking political office are obliged to demonstrate a fondness for football in the way in which candidates for the presidency of the United States have to affect a keenness for a round of golf.

As Chelsea lifted the Champions League trophy in May 2012, the British prime minister's image makers ensured that David Cameron was photographed at a G8 summit punching the air in celebration. His chancellor went one better: George Osborne, who attended the final in Munich's Allianz Arena, was snapped grinning in the background even as the cup was presented. And twenty-five years on, that secretive fan so embarrassed about admitting to watching Match of the Day was hosting a party at which the whole point was for guests to watch that Champions League final live on television.

Perhaps surprisingly, at its inception those who started the Premier League had no idea quite what they were unleashing. David Dein, the former Arsenal chief executive who was one of the architects of the competition, recalls that many of those involved in running English football in its unfashionable trough were hardly far-sighted. In those days, his was not a business run by visionaries. To most of them, abroad was a foreign country. Dein gives an insight into the prevailing mindset at that time:

I remember my first ever meeting [of football's leading club representatives] when I proposed there should be two substitutes instead of one. It got outvoted when one of the club chairmen on the committee said: 'we can't have that, it's an extra hotel room, an extra meal, an extra win bonus.' Honestly, much of the thinking in the game was more than antiquated. It was stuck in the dark ages.

What made many of these men in charge of the country's leading clubs change their ideas was an approach from Greg Dyke in the summer of 1991. The future Director General of the BBC (and future chairman of the FA), then in charge of ITV Sport, Dyke came in their direction flourishing the one thing certain to grab their attention: a wad of money. After years of resistance from chairmen who imagined it would lead to a diminution in crowds attending matches (the essence of their objection was: why would people pay when they could watch it for free on TV?) league football had at last begun to be shown live on television in 1983. Transmissions were, however, intermittent and irregular; a dispute prevented even highlights being made available during the 1985–86 season. And a cartel of BBC and ITV kept the price paid down to a minimum.

Dyke reasoned that consistency of broadcast was essential. If his company was going to draw advertisers to sell their wares in breaks around the matches, they had to be games people wanted to watch. Moreover, he insisted that the traditional system of paying for televised football was, like much of the way the game administered itself, archaic. He wondered why it should be that the clubs that might draw a television audience shared their income with the other members of the Football League. The twenty-two First Division clubs had to hand over a good chunk of their earnings to the seventy others in the lower divisions. Which seemed all the more bizarre when it was really only half a dozen of those in the top division who generated big viewing figures. But then, his dealings with the game had only made him the more astonished at how poorly it was administered, how lacking in ambition it was to make the most of its potential allure.

'People called it one, but football wasn't a business at all,' he recalls. 'I was once asked to speak at a conference entitled business and football. I said there is a connection between business and football; business is where you make your money and football is where you lose it.'

Visions for the future

Dyke sensed it could be different; he recognized there was a huge latent interest in the game that, if armchair access were properly exploited, could generate sizeable revenue. And he had the financial wherewithal to kickstart change. He was prepared to pay big money for live football matches – up to £1 million a game. But only for the ones which caught the public imagination, ones like Liverpool against Arsenal in May 1989, which had dragged millions to their screens to watch the title being decided before their very eyes. He was not interested in the old-school type of deal which required that for every not-to-be-missed fixture screened, a couple of non-events were shown. He found he was not alone in his vision. When Dyke planted the idea of a breakaway division, splitting from the century-old Football League and re-forming itself as a new, sparky, must-watch television-friendly competition, it was the kind of thinking that appealed to some of those, like Dein, who wanted the game to embrace a more businesslike approach.

'When I joined Arsenal's board in 1983, total turnover was under £2 million, it wasn't a business in any sense of the word,' says Dein. 'What I saw was a chance to create something that would be attractive to investors, so we could upgrade our stadiums. To do that we had to make football a true event.'

By coincidence, at that precise moment the Football Association, the governing body of the game in England since 1863, also felt things had to change. Alarmed at how their sport was perceived in the national consciousness, the body commissioned a report into its possible future organization, written by Alex Fynn, an executive at Saatchi and Saatchi, the advertising agency that had successfully marketed Thatcher's Conservative Party. Fynn – a man whose observations about English football are as acute as anyone's – concluded that a top division of fewer clubs would benefit the game as a whole. His view was simply summarized: 'Less is more,' he claims. 'What the television audience wanted was Arsenal against Manchester United, not Coventry against Oldham, who were two clubs in the top division at the time.'

Fynn, however, did not counsel breaking away. Instead, he recommended that his smaller top division should sit at the pinnacle of a regionalized league pyramid. What he did not appreciate was how his report would lubricate the internal politics of the FA, historically always anxious to bloody the nose of its rival, the Football League (the governing body of the English league competition since 1888). 'I thought I was giving them a vision about how they could be the true custodian of the professional and amateur game,' he says of his report. 'In fact I was giving them the ammunition to do what they had long wanted: smash the power of the Football League.'

So when Dein and other representatives of the self-styled Big Five clubs at the time (Manchester United, Liverpool, Tottenham, Arsenal and Everton) approached the FA with the idea of revolution, the concurrence of thinking could not have been more timely. 'We went to the FA and said we believe English football is in the doldrums, the only way we're going to get change is if we create a new league,' recalls Dein. 'We want to start afresh. And they agreed, they said the timing is right and they opened the door for us.'

With the FA prepared to sanction breakaway – and with Fynn and his argument for main-taining continuity quietly sidelined – the leading clubs had the official backing they needed. The Premier League was created at a meeting of the First Division club chairmen on 20 Feb-ruary 1992. The divorce settlement maintained relegation to and promotion from the Football League. In a telling demonstration of football's shifting powerbase, two of the clubs who voted for the formation of the new competition have never benefited from its success. Luton Town and Notts County were relegated at the end of the final season of the First Division and have never been close to regaining a place at the top table since.

Sky-high profits

They were not the only ones who missed out. Although he had been the man who sowed the seed, Dyke never enjoyed the fruits of his idea. At the time, Rupert Murdoch's BSkyB satellite television service was stumbling and stuttering, haemorrhaging money; contemporary reports suggested losses were totalling more than a million pounds a day. Murdoch had initially believed that movies would be the best way to sell subscriptions to pay television, but uptake had been sluggish. Executives at his company sensed that football might be different. As Fynn had noted, the football supporter offered a distinctive commercial opportunity:

Fans are different from customers. A customer can take his business elsewhere; even if he's loyal he will occasionally be promiscuous. But if you're a football fan you cannot change your allegiance. It's given to you.

Sky's executives recognized that the semi-religious affiliations the game engendered could be converted into subscriptions. Fans would be obliged by their passion to pay to watch their own team in live action. In short, love of football could be monetized.

Whole books have been written about what happened next, but here's the brief synopsis. When negotiations opened with the fledgling league about who would televise matches, Dyke was outflanked. It didn't help his cause that the chairman of Tottenham, Alan Sugar, was the man whose Amstrad company supplied the satellite dishes for Sky. He and Murdoch were old associates. Indeed, Murdoch had encouraged him to take over Tottenham in the first place. At the time Robert Maxwell, then Murdoch's great newspaper- owning rival, was circling the club. Murdoch rang Sugar and suggested he take the chairmanship at Maxwell's expense. He wanted, in his own elegant phrase, to 'see off that fat cunt'. In the midst of the boardroom scurry, Maxwell fell overboard from his luxury yacht and drowned off the Canary Islands. And Sugar moved into Spurs unopposed.

During those first television negotiations, Sugar remembered his old friend. Busily briefing on his fellow chairmen's strategy, he advised Murdoch that the best way to win over the group over was to 'blast the opposition out the water'. So Sky's negotiating team bid £302 million for a five-year deal for exclusive rights to cover live matches, way beyond what ITV had offered. With the BBC picking up the right to show highlights for a further £22.5 million across five years, it was the kind of combined sum that made the eyes of the chairmen of the twenty-two breakaway clubs water. Dein doesn't see it that way, however:

This was never really about money. The ambition was to create a league which could put English football back on the map and challenge the top clubs in Europe. And I think what Greg did was give us the courage to do something about it.

Never really about money? As he was speaking on the phone at the time, it is hard to know where Dein's tongue was in relation to his cheek. Although, in truth, not every broadcasting contract associated with the Premier League brought in a shedload. The radio rights to cover matches live were sold to the BBC for just £65,000 a year. Or less than a third of Yaya Touré's weekly wage two decades later.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Premier League by Jim White. Copyright © 2013 Jim White. Excerpted by permission of Head of Zeus Ltd.
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Table of Contents

Introduction: It's football Jim, but not as we know it Manchester City v. Manchester United Etihad Stadium, Manchester Sunday 9 December 2012 8

Match 1 If Fergie had his way they'd still be playing Manchester United v. Sheffield Wednesday Old Trafford, Manchester Saturday 10 April 1993 22

Match 2 If I want to kick a fan I do it Crystal Palace v. Manchester United Selhurst Park, London Wednesday 25 January 1995 54

Match 3 We weren't singing Shearer songs Liverpool v. Blackburn Rovers Anfield Stadium, Liverpool Sunday 13 May 1995 86

Match 4 He went to Man United and he won the lot Manchester United v. Tottenham Hotspur Old Trafford, Manchester Sunday 16 May 1999 120

Match 5 We won the League at White Hart Lane Tottenham Hotspur v. Arsenal White Hart Lane, London Sunday 25 April 2004 158

Match 6 Marching on together Leeds United v. Charlton Athletic Elland Road, Leeds Saturday 8 May 2004 190

Match 7 Taking the rest to the cleaners Bolton Wanderers v. Chelsea Reebok Stadium, Bolton Saturday 30 April 2005 220

Match 8 Top, top entertainment Portsmouth v. Reading Fratton Park, Portsmouth Saturday 29 September 2007 252

Match 9 Fourth is the new first Manchester City v. Tottenham Hotspur City of Manchester Stadium Wednesday 5 May 2010 286

Match 10 Now it's Mancini Time Manchester City v. Queens Park Rangers Etihad Stadium, Manchester Sunday 13 May 2012 320

Postscript: To he continued… Queens Park Rangers v. Stoke City Loftus Road Stadium, London Saturday 20 April 2013 352

Premier League Stats and Facts 370

Acknowledgements 395

Bibliography 395

Index 396

Picture Credits 400

Editorial Reviews

"It’s all fascinating, with White exceptional at evoking the passion of the 10 matches." —FourFour Two

"He evokes the sweat and effort of the matches in thrilling detail." —Liverpool Echo

"Wonderfully entertaining."  —Sunday Telegraph

"This book captures the best from the history of the Premier League and is a must read for absolutely any football fan." —InternationalSoccerNetwork

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