Thirty years of the Premier League: football’s journey from outlaw pursuit to digital juggernaut

The Sky-era revolution has transformed the product into a profit machine driven by a thirst for tech consumption

A WHOLE NEW BALL GAME: Sky Sports Premier League ad 1992

In another timeline, a version of the present where things had turned out differently on the gore-soaked fields of the satellite broadcast wars in the summer of 1990, Britain might by now be three decades into its great, transformative opera boom.

In this version of events, sparked by British Satellite Broadcasting’s decisive victory over the long-forgotten “Sky TV”, the nation has spent the years since in thrall to BSB’s relentless, beautifully packaged operatic programming – to the extent all other human activity now seems subservient to the national obsession with rolling 24-hour bel canto, Super Saturday chamber music, the multimillion-pound conductor transfer roundabout.