Tommy Martin: The roaring Premier League juggernaut has survived it all
I LIKE THE KICKING: The famous Sky Sports Premier League ad from 1992.
You might have seen the photo doing the rounds this week as the Premier League’s 30th season dawns. A promotional shot from around this time back in 1992/93, featuring one player from each of the 20 clubs competing in the inaugural chapter of English football’s brave new world.
There they were, the best and brightest of the English game: Andy Sinton, Gordons Durie and Strachan…er, Tim Flowers… (squints really hard) is that John Wark? Andy Ritchie is there representing Oldham Athletic, who’ve just dropped out of the Football League. There’s David Hirst of Sheffield Wednesday and Lee Hurst of Coventry City, two clubs once sturdy top-flight regulars since fallen on hard times.
Star power was provided by the injury prone Lee Sharpe of Manchester United, Peter Beardsley (then at Everton) and Chelsea’s Vinny Jones, soon to embark on an unlikely career in Hollywood. Wimbledon goalkeeper Hans Segers is the only ‘foreigner’ and all but three of the faces are white.
The point being, if you were claiming that the launch of the Premier League was an exercise in style over substance, a tarted-up version of the same old thing, the century-old English First Division with a lick of paint, then this was your evidence. When – in response to the trotting out of some Premier League scoring statistic – people roll their eyes and sarcastically say ‘oh yeah, because football only began in 1992’, this is what they mean.
Writing in last weekend’s , Peter Schmeichel, whose Manchester United team would dominate the new era, confirmed the sense of change being cosmetic. “At first, the most noticeable difference was playing with designated squad numbers and names on the back of our shirts,” Schmeichel wrote. “Now, I was ‘Schmeichel 1’ and that’s how it would stay. Incey was ‘Ince 8’.”
Schmeichel also remembers how English football was literally rebuilding itself. Old Trafford was one of several stadiums being renovated following the findings of the Taylor Report into the Hillsborough disaster. “You associate the Premier League with looking slick,” Schmeichel said, “but in the first season it felt like I played a lot of matches at building sites.”
When it came to the new Premier League, the style was the substance. The promotional campaign that brought together that galaxy of glamour (Ian Butterworth, David Hillier, Alan Kernaghan etc) was at the behest of Sky Sports, whose involvement as broadcast partner was the single defining change of 30 summers ago. The tagline of that campaign was ‘A Whole New Ball Game.’ The presentation and packaging, the sense of a distinct, compelling product – this was what allowed Sky to sell the new-fangled satellite dishes and subscriptions which would fund the stadium rebuilds and, eventually, investment in players whose names were not necessarily Ian or Andy.
That notion of being new and different and separate and better than everything else was part of the Premier League origin story. It was, after all, a breakaway league, one that wanted to go its own way and make its own deals and only co-exist with the rest of the English football system in the most tacit, grudging terms.
As the years went on, those foundational qualities were what people slagged it off about. When Italian and then Spanish teams dominated Europe and hogged the world’s best talent, people would laugh about the grandiose claims coming out of Sky Sports studios. Best league in the world? You’re having a laugh, as Bolton Wanderers toiled in the UEFA Cup.
But only now, 30 summers on, has the vision shot through in those cheesy ad campaigns come to full fruition. If the idea of the Premier League was about a high concept franchise, a cultural phenomenon distinct from that which went before as well as its rivals elsewhere, something unique and desirable, then it has fulfilled its mission in a way that would have been inconceivable to Gordon Durie and the lads back in the day.
While stylish packaging and marketing were the most visible trappings of the Whole New Ball Game, the real driver of its success was in hitching its wagon to the wider trends of globalisation and neoliberalism. Hardly surprising when Rupert Murdoch was the most influential figure in its conception. Like the City of London, it allowed itself to be an unregulated clearing house for anyone, from anywhere, with money enough to buy a seat at the table.
The Premier League was at once of English football but also able to unmoor itself from its roots in a way La Liga and Serie A, its closest rivals, would not do. While Italian football was crippled with institutional and structural failures and Spain too much in thrall to the power of Real Madrid and Barcelona, for the Premier League the product was king and the product was the Premier League. TV revenues were divided more equally, competitiveness was ensured and eventually the actuality far outstripped the slapped-on faux glamour of the early days.
This was, indeed, a new ball game – no longer a domestic football league but an international brand that you could touch whether you were in Manchester or Mumbai or Moscow. Now it is common to hear the Premier League has, in fact, become the de facto Super League. It has long been the richest but now boasts the best coaches and, with the arrival of Erling Haaland at Manchester City, can claim to attract the best talents in their prime years.
At various times over the three decades, it has seemed that its greed and venality must make it prone to collapse, that something built on so much hot air must eventually come down. That has yet to happen.
More than that, the tumult of recent years has washed over the Premier League in a way that is chilling for its competitors. Sure, many clubs cut their cloth and took advantage of furlough schemes during the pandemic. But when business resumed, Premier League clubs spent a net €655 million in the summer of 2021. Its closest rival was La Liga, whose clubs spent just €65 million net.
Heading into its 30th season, the Premier League resembles one of those raging juggernauts from George Miller’s , roaring into the future with a snarl and the thrang of loud guitars. Pandemics and oligarchs, Bosman and Brexit, recessions and Super League threats, accusations of moral turpitude and racism, sheikhs and Sam Allardyce – it has survived and absorbed them all, selling to the world an idea that seemed pretty far-fetched back when the Andys, Ians and Gordons were the stars of the show.
