How the 1990s saved English football

Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be. The word was coined in 1668 as a medical diagnosis, combining the Greek nostos (homecoming) and algos (ache or pain: see also neuralgia, ‘nerve-pain’). The neologiser was scholar Johannes Hofer, describing the homesickness of far-flung Swiss soldiers pining for the Alps.

Since then nostalgia has gone from being a treatable condition to a heritage industry, a lucrative revisiting not of place but time: “Remember when this happened?”. Sufferers are indulged but also mocked for living in the past, seen as Luddite heretics railing against the mantra of progress. Why live in the past when the future is inevitable?

These and other problems lead to the catch-all complaint known as #AgainstModernFootball, an umbrella for the usual variety of worried citizens, reactionaries and young fogeys. In several cases, they’ve got a point. But as usual, the case is overstated when oversimplified and transmuted into its natural corollary: If Now Is Bad, Then Must Have Been Better. As New York Times writer Carl Wilson puts it: “Nostalgia tends to neuter critique”. Thus we find the 1990s reductively blamed for everything wrong with the modern world, by digital natives who were not around to witness what went before.

Nobody who attended games in the 1980s could sanely wish to turn back the clock and regularly experience it all again. Yes, the changes wrought by the ’90s were commercial but they were also cultural and social, while creating big advances in communication, entertainment, quality, availability, accountability and choice. The decade accelerated our sport from a despised primitive minority concern to this planet's finest lesire pursuit.

It might sound exaggerated but this is how football fans were perceived. In 1985 – the year of Heysel, the Bradford disaster, the Luton-Millwall riot, of English teams being banned from European competition – The Times described the game as “a slum sport played in slum stadiums and increasingly watched by slum people”. And this wasn’t an unusual opinion; many would merely alter “slum” to “scum”.

As the economic hardships of the ’80s continued to bite, the football fan became a lightning rod for societal ills. 1985 was also the year of riots away from football stadiums – in Brixton, Toxteth, Peckham and Broadwater Farm. But somehow it was all football’s fault. When Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher hauled various dignitaries to a No.10 crisis summit after Heysel, she asked what football was going to do about its hooligans. Football Association chief Ted Croker dared to challenge the Iron Lady: “These people are society’s problems – we don’t want your hooligans in our sport, Prime Minister.” Croker became the first FA secretary in a century not to be knighted.

Around the same time, incidences of hooliganism waned sharply – particularly at matches. Those in search of combat thrills might still meet up for a tear-up, but it tended to happen away from the ground and away from the public gaze, which was just fine by the real fans. To the amazement of amateur sociologists, it turned out a generous proportion of the ‘hooligans’ were simply bored middle-class blokes emasculated by their office jobs. Strange how they never mentioned it at cocktail parties...

Meanwhile, a small but still influential number of supporters on the terraces were having their brain chemistry changed by a popular new street drug: it’s difficult to kick off a riot when you’re mellowed out by Ecstasy. Following the Second Summer of Love in 1988 and the rise of Madchester in 1989, New Order had wanted to call England’s official Italia 90 single E for England. The FA were not that naive, but World in Motion – widely lauded as the best football single ever – still contained some none-too-subtle references in “one on one”, while the words in the chorus (“Love’s got the world in motion and I know what we can do”) were hardly the stuff of Chopper Harris and Norman Hunter.

Whatever their working knowledge of Italian, the wider English public fell hard for Gazza, and by extension for football. As The Guardian’s John Mulholland put it in 1994, “Gazza cried. The nation wiped away his tears and the media floodgates opened. Since then, coverage of football has seeped into previously unchartered territory: into the upscale literary magazines Granta and The London Review of Books; The Manageress has scored on television; thousands have enjoyed their Evening with Gary Lineker [a play based on the World Cup semi-final]; and tonight Opera North unveil their new soccer opera, Playing Away. The media deluge has been awesome.”

As a result, overseas footballers – excluding the Irish – continued to be a rare species. Those who had been here were sporadic and exotic outliers like Newcastle’s Chilean siblings, “George” and “Ted” Robledo, broken-necked Bert Trautmann, Ossie and Ricky at White Hart Lane or erratic Villa winger Didier Six. The idea appeared to be that foreigners weren’t to be trusted to make their way through a muddy winter: the Wet Wednesday Night in Stoke is not a new concept.

There were some imports in the English game as the ’90s dawned, though they were few and far between. As an indicative example, the Arsenal 1989/90 squad contained just the one player born outside the British Isles – Icelandic bit-parter Siggi Jonsson, who’d spent five years at Barnsley and Sheffield Wednesday before moving to Highbury. Few Gooners were complaining: George Graham’s well-drilled yeomen had won the 1989 title in rather exciting fashion. But fewer still pined for those times after a decade of Arsene Wenger, Dennis Bergkamp and Thierry Henry. It was, safe to say, a bit better.

It wasn’t only Arsenal who benefited: just about every team decided that maybe we could learn something from Johnny Foreigner, and he was largely welcomed. Even the most zealous of xenophobes couldn’t carp when his side was immeasurably improved by a Gianfranco Zola, Georgi Kinkladze, Eric Cantona or Juninho. By the midway point of the decade, Champions League-winning strikers were joining clubs such as Middlesbrough, which is a bit like Watford bringing in Karim Benzema from Real Madrid.

Increasingly, the appreciation wasn’t merely parochial. The vast majority of the general public acknowledged that world-class players might be worth watching and incorporating. Drawing genuine admiration from around the ground, players like Ruud Gullit would be applauded off away pitches; even during the bitterest of derbies, fans at Old Trafford found themselves applauding the spectacular bicycle-kick attempted by some Leeds player called Cantona.

In the event, he won Fergie a fair few things: four titles in his five seasons, the exception coming during an enforced lay-off following his overly enthusiastic meet-the-crowd session at Selhurst Park. Even that event, causing headlines around the world, proved how huge Cantona and the Premier League had become. By welcoming the world, the English top flight was on its way to becoming the globe’s pre-eminent league.

Stars accumulated because Sky speculated. The story of Rupert Murdoch’s huge gamble – popularising his bin-lid TV start-up by ring-fencing live coverage of Premier League football in return for a then stratospheric £304m (the previous exclusive deal had cost ITV just £44m) – is well-known. Sky’s influence is also both divisive and intrusive: ask anyone who’s schlepped to and from a rearranged kick-off, or watched his or her lower-league side’s only half-decent player get plucked away to rot in a big club’s reserves.

But it’s worth going over a few of the benefits and ruling out a few half-truths that appear to have hardened into dogma. First, Sky did not “split” football. The FA did that thanks to its 1991 Blueprint for the Future of Football – advocating a breakaway league following a century of fiscal solidarity. Designed to wrestle control away from the Football League, the Blueprint was quickly approved by the bigger outfits who had helped to guide it, knowing they could guarantee a greater share of the earnings.

That wouldn’t have been necessary had the Football League chosen to accept a 1995 offer from the Premier League to grant the 72 clubs between 20% and 25% of any future joint TV deal in perpetuity. Instead the Football League opted to go it alone with a much weaker hand. The most recent live deal – Sky again – is worth £180m a season; 20-25% of the Premier League contract would have been worth more like £428m.

What Sky did for English football was to make it rich. This attracted far better participants, and eventually the cream of the global market. These players enriched the product, in turn making it more desirable and sellable. Besides, while largely footing the wage bill, Sky serviced you, the football consumer. Before Sky, apart from on the morning of the FA Cup final, there was no in-depth coverage: a weekly episode of Football Focus was as good as it got.

Even live games were pitifully bookended by minimal analysis. Check out YouTube (below) for the clash between Norwich and Manchester United in 1989/90, televised live on The Match. The chucklesome intro graphics make way to reveal the two teams coming out onto the pitch, leaving less than four minutes before kick-off. In that time, sheepskin-coated pitchside host Elton Welsby allows guest Graham Taylor literally eight seconds on the mic before sending him to the gantry while Brian Moore runs through the teams.

Away from live coverage, Sky had acres of schedules to fill and proceeded to do so with ancillary programming. To begin with there was an awful lot of WWF, golf and the Bruno Brookes-hosted fishing show Tight Lines, but new output started appearing. Gray’s Boot Room provided in-depth tactical discussion via the medium of the Subbuteo pitch, while Friday-night debate show Hold the Back Page brought together Fleet Street’s finest well before they had to pretend to be sitting in Jimmy Hill’s kitchen for Sunday Supplement.

By 1994 there was enough content for the launch of Sky Sports 2, and Soccer AM debuted the following year. Afternoon-filler Soccer Saturday and hangover remedy Goals on Sunday both arrived in 1996 – the same year as Kevin Keegan’s “I would love it” post-match rant at Richard Keys – and in 1998 along came Sky Sports News with its hours of rolling reports, interviews, speculation and (eventually) Deadline Day reporters being assailed with giant pink sex toys. It’s all a long way from Elton Welsby.

While TV production company Chrysalis were filming Paul Gascoigne’s recuperation from his FA Cup Final knee-knack, the injured party noted that it was a shame nobody in Britain would be able to watch him play for Lazio. A lightbulb quietly popped into life, Chrysalis bought the rights to Serie A’s UK coverage and sold them to Channel 4 for £1.6m: a live game per week plus the Saturday morning preview show Gazzetta Football Italia. (Later came Mezzanotte, a highlights package aired late on Sunday and midweek evenings.)

Boldly but ultimately wisely, Chrysalis instead promoted their researcher James Richardson to the front of cameras. It worked brilliantly. With the urbane but approachable Richardson – who had learned the lingo to converse with a Roman inamorata – sipping his coffee outside an Italian cafe, gesticulating at his mysterious pink newspaper, Saturday’s Gazzetta performed a double function: as a primer for those who didn’t know Serie A’s dramatis personae, and as an update for those who did.

“Italian football was huge back then,” Richardson has noted. “We’d just had a World Cup in Italy and it really captured the imagination. This was football in many of the same locations, a lot of the same stadiums. It was also a league which featured three members of that English team [Gascoigne, David Platt and Des Walker]. For anyone who enjoyed Italia 90 it was almost like a spin-off series.”

Indeed, Serie A’s 1992/93 season had some big names, and not just in the traditional Italian stronghold of defence. Milan had the Dutch trio of Marco Van Basten, Ruud Gullit and Frank Rijkaard; Ruben Sosa banged in 20 for city rivals Inter; Juventus alone could choose between Gianluca Vialli, Roberto Baggio, Paolo Di Canio, Fabrizio Ravanelli and Pierluigi Casiraghi up front; also among the goals that season were Gabriel Batistuta, Jean-Pierre Papin, Gianfranco Zola and Roberto Mancini.

Football Italia soon had more than three million viewers, for whom Channel 4 had paid around 50p each; meanwhile, some Premier League matches on Sky – who had paid £304m for a five-year contract – struggled to attract as many as 400,000. (As broadcasters have found recently, the appetite for live football is far from insatiable. A few years into the new millennium, an ITV Digital game between Nottingham Forest and Bradford attracted just over 1,000 Thursday-night viewers.)

As the decade progressed and football became more popular, it found other niches in the television schedule. From 1991 to 1994, BBC Two’s ‘yoof’ producer, Janet Street-Porter, sanctioned four series of Standing Room Only – an entertaining attempt to make a TV fanzine. Touring the country’s grounds, its Supporterloo mobile studio gave fans a chance to vent opinions to camera. Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell produced a comic strip, Rory Bremner added voices, and David Baddiel and Rob Newman contributed comedy.

In time for Euro 96, the hosts wrote and recorded vocals for a joint single with The Lightning Seeds. In contrast to every previous ‘football song’, the lyrics to Three Lions managed to strike the perfect balance between head-hung despair and misty-eyed optimism that generally characterises the fans’ experience. No wonder it went to No.1, and did so again two years later ahead of the 1998 World Cup, with updated lyrics reflecting England’s latest near-miss.

Euro 96 was peak ’90s. Soundtracked by Britpop and a sociologically neat foreshadow of the impending New Labour revolution – high hopes of happier times, and eventual ennui or anger at things ending up the same as they always do. And with Scotland drawn in the same group, it also prompted England fans to start waving the George Cross rather than the Union Jack, a faltering first step along the road to a separate English identity and, arguably, the UK’s dissolution. Tony Blair’s 1997 manifesto included pledged referendums on a Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly, and the 1999 Good Friday Agreement created several institutions bridging the north and south of Ireland.

In truth it was not the greatest of tournaments – the attendances were iffy everywhere but Wembley and the goal rate was low – but Euro 96 felt like a football party with Britpop banging on the stereo. It might sound trite, but it’s rather fun to stage an international tournament – it’s probably a sign of just how much the FA is despised around the world that despite the Premier League riches helping to build arguably the finest collection of stadiums on the planet, England have only been allowed to host one major tournament in half a century.

England’s semi-final exit from Euro 96 didn’t stop the momentum of what became known as Cool Britannia, though as is the way with fads, it quickly provoked a backlash. For a minute there, everything looked tremendously exciting. “Hindsight often judges the era unfavourably,” writes Michael Gibbons in When Football Came Home: England, the English and Euro 96. “But a generation that had emerged from the rubble of the 1980s in Britain helped to send an undeniable wave of optimism through the country. For a short while, anything seemed possible.”

Lobbing disdain from a distance, some pour scorn on the Britpop era – there’s a limit to anyone’s taste for inter-Gallagher squabbling and lager-vomit. The denser end of lad culture tarnished the whole with an ever-lower common denominator: boobs, booze and bants. It wasn’t always thus. Founding Loaded editor James Brown often highlights the fact that early cover stars included Gary Oldman, Airplane! star Leslie Nielsen and a young ‘Prince’ Naseem Hamed.

The mighty organ you hold in your hands was first unleashed in 1994, shortly after the only postwar World Cup for which none of the Home Nations qualified (the decade wasn’t all sunshine and chocolate, but having a summer free from the binds of bias allowed a generation to become happily infatuated with Hagi, Stoichkov, Romario, Baggio and Bergkamp). Modesty prevents a full solo on the bugle of self-promotion, but FourFourTwo was always designed to appeal to intelligent, thoughtful, amusing, good-looking opinion-formers like you, and all the mates you’re going to persuade to subscribe.

Previously, the only writing about many small teams had come from trite match programmes or local press coverage neutered by the need to nurture good relationships with the club. Now, fans could read – and write – honest opinions about their favourite bunch of idiots. As Peter Hooton – later the lead singer of The Farm, but before that the editor of influential Scouse fanzine The End – says: “Fanzines gave people an outlet which they didn’t have at that time. Nowadays everyone has a voice on Twitter.”

The increasing depth and breadth of fanzines could be determined monthly by one of the movement’s forebearers, WSC. Its circulation peaked at around 40,000 in the early-90s, though it played a vital role in the cross-pollination of ideas by the simple but crucial provision of a fanzine directory. In the back of every issue it printed a nationwide list of titles and addresses. That list then expanded from 22 in 1988 to a double-page spread, and as fanzines multiplied – by some estimates, 600 titles came and (largely) went – the list became so big that it was split over three consecutive issues. Visiting supporters could now hunt down the home side’s latest issue, or order via the postal service. An underground network was later established, with echoes of the independent music scene: indeed, issues were often available in non-chain record shops.

Having come to prominence in the 1980s and dwindled as print concerns in the post-millennial spread of the internet, fanzines boomed in the 1990s thanks to the proliferation of desktop publishing programs such as PageMaker. Previously, most fanzines looked like the amateur productions they were – often annotated typewritten pages reproduced on photocopiers, having been put together using a process in which “cut and paste” meant using scissors and glue.

Even after the advent of DTP, many fanzine aficionados (readers and editors alike) preferred the rough-and-ready look, but this just created more choice. Clubs now produced more than one fanzine: an enviably glossy mag like The Gooner alongside a typewriter-and-Tippex affair like The Arsenal Echo Echo. And whatever the end product, the editors were grounded in the full gamut of production: writing, commissioning, editing, illustrating, typesetting (of some sort or other), design (ditto), reproduction, sales, distribution and planning. Fanzines created a new generation of journalists, including this writer.

Amis’s hateful tirade was an unarguably prevalent public view. When Saturday Comes writer Ed Horton labelled the review “class snobbery” and “a poisonous display of ignorance and bigotry aimed at the scum of the earth – you or I, the football fan.” He was correct, but the Amis rant – published in a new Sunday paper that was aimed squarely at the educated middle class – showed how acceptable it was to demonise football fans, and how low opinions of them had sunk.

“Prior to Italia 90, football in England was perceived as a squalid and hooligan-ridden embarrassing sump of gormless violence,” says Pete Davies. “You did not talk about it over dinner. Now it’s hard to go anywhere without people talking about it. It simply wasn’t a polite topic of conversation, as it was an embarrassment. Therefore nobody ever wrote about it – there was no such thing as a good football book back in 1989.”

Albeit helped by circumstance – Gazza’s tears, England’s heartbreak and Robson’s dignity – he succeeded brilliantly through his ability and, crucially, empathy. Not bad for a book that Davies had only started researching as an explainer for the American market, in an attempt to get a publisher to pay his way around USA 94. “The biggest sport on earth was a complete and utter mystery to them – I thought: ‘Let’s explain it to them’.”

In fact, the market already existed before Hornby or Davies. In 1983, Simon Inglis managed to convince a publisher into a 4,000 print run of stadium-architecture investigation The Football Grounds of England and Wales. Four years later, it was updated with Scottish additions as The Football Grounds of Great Britain. The two versions sold more than 120,000 copies – not bad for a fairly academic study published at the nadir of attendances: back in 1985/86, the average crowd among the 92 Football League clubs was 8,130 – a little over a third of the post-war peak of 22,333 in 1948/49.

Publishers could repackage the heritage works of supremely talented writers such as Hugh McIlvanney (McIlvanney on Football, 1994) and Eduardo Galeano (Football in Sun and Shadow, 1997). They could also commission new takes at legendary tales (The Robin Friday Story, 1998) and they could confidently distribute some niche works, such as Joe McGinniss’s The Miracle of Castel di Sangro (1999). Come the end of the decade, they could even pay Alex Ferguson a seven-figure sum for his autobiography. As usual, not everything they pushed to market proved to be gold or even good, but at least we crisp-faced, swearing, belching sub-humanity had the choice.

The Observer said that Fever Pitch caused “the emergence of a new class of soccer fan – cultured and discerning”, but that’s a somewhat arrogant dismissal of the fans who went before. Kuper was an Oxford alumnus roughly a decade after Hornby had attended Cambridge. Football had never been simply for the thicko plebs. It had always attracted followers of all intelligences and backgrounds – it just ceased to be a dinner-party bete noire.

As Kuper puts it: “Hornby didn’t get the middle classes involved in football, but he allowed them to talk about football in their books and newspapers.” Even so, the somewhat sudden embrace by society’s middle orders caused some resentment in the working-class bedrock. Kuper had noticed an attitude of “‘People shouldn’t write literate stuff about football, football’s an honest working-class game and all these Johnny-come-lately middle-class poseurs should get out.’ Nick Hornby got a lot of that, but it’s gone away now.”

At the beginning of the ’90s, the radio played a prominent part in the travelling supporter’s life. Every Saturday teatime, faced with miles of mirthless motorway and an annoying wait of a few years before cars habitually sported CD players, away fans would religiously listen to as much of Sports Report as was left when they reached the motor from the terrace, and then… well, to start with, that was pretty much it. For the first year after its launch in August 1990, the new Radio Five (not yet known as “Five Live”) was a mongrel beast that covered the news, sport, education, children’s programmes and, from 6pm on Saturday evenings, The European Chart Show.

From the off, Baker was determined that this would not be a boring dissection of tactics. One topic on the maiden show, signposted ‘Just How Crooked Are Referees?’, attracted a call from Chelsea’s midfielder Andy Townsend, who was only too happy to reel off a few decisions from that afternoon’s match that he believed were questionable. As Baker notes: “Andy’s remarks made the Sunday back pages, and 606 was instantly declared to be the only place to go for all football fans when in transit each weekend.”

The phone-in format was hardly new – one is mentioned in a 1925 edition of the Radio Times, and BBC Radio Sheffield had been hosting the football-themed Praise or Grumble for four years – but supporters flocked to put their two pennies’ worth across. The 1995 launch of Talk Radio (later refocused and renamed TalkSport) offered an alternative, and across the dial phone-ins proliferated – a prototype social media. As with any social medium now, at worst it can end up becoming bar bores shouting at each other, but at best it can provide some genuine insight and entertainment.

Games also helped to broaden the minds. FourFourTwo contributor turned Blizzard editor Jonathan Wilson has suggested that the growth of supporters’ scope from parochial insularity to global awareness can be partly ascribed to the massive success of Football Manager. Sports Interactive studio director Miles Jacobson notes how: “When Hatem Ben Arfa signed for Newcastle and Alan Shearer said on Match of the Day that he’d never heard of him, loads of people went on Twitter to say: ‘He obviously doesn’t play Football Manager’.”

Stumbled upon when technicians were trying to find a way to send subtitles over the airwaves, the BBC’s Ceefax service had launched in 1974. ITV’s service Oracle (Optional Reception of Announcements by Coded Line Electronics) was replaced in 1993, having been outbid for the franchise by Teletext. The limitations of the platform were obvious: no pictures, apart from ones laboriously formulated from alphabetical characters like a full-screen emoji. No video: a maximum of 24 lines on each screen, with a maximum of 40 characters per line.

If it sounds rubbish, that’s because it was, but if it was the best way of keeping in touch, that’s what you did. At the beginning of the ’90s, a phone was something that sat on a side table in your house and the internet was something you may have heard fleetingly mentioned on Tomorrow’s World. Though Radio Two might carry match commentary sometimes, sports stations didn’t exist on the radio, let alone TV.

So the best way to keep up with developing sports stories – like, say, latest scores – was to watch Teletext. On the BBC, you’d tap in 303 for the First Division matches and then be presented with alphabetised latest scores, split up over three pages (more as the pages clogged with the goalscorers and sendings-off). If your team’s score didn’t show up on that page, you just had to wait while the technology scrolled through, like a vindictive Vidiprinter. This mute, pixellated, bare-bones information was the way that millions of armchair fans discovered their team were going to Wembley, or getting relegated.

As the decade progressed, so did fans’ ways to keep in touch. Along came the internet, with the stuffy old Daily Telegraph becoming a surprise early adopter by founding the Electronic Telegraph (no, really) in 1994. Soccernet, set up with assistance from the Daily Mail, launched for the start of the 1995/96 campaign, and others soon followed suit, including the BBC’s website, the Mirror/PA joint venture Sportinglife.com and Football365, helmed by the former NME editor Danny Kelly and at one point valued at half a billion quid. And these sites began to reach wider audiences later in the decade, particularly around the time of the 1998 World Cup with the advent of minute-by-minute coverage.

But while primitive browsers such as Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator might connect you to cyberspace via a dial-up modem, the information trickled towards you at a maximum theoretical speed of 56 kilobits per second, which was, in practice, usually more like 20kb. (For comparison, service providers now provide up to 300 megabits per second). And that was until someone wanted to use the phone, which shared the line with the modem: you couldn’t call someone and surf the Net simultaneously. And obviously there was no such thing as the mobile internet. What a time to be alive.

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Gary Parkinson is a freelance writer, editor, trainer, muso, singer, actor and coach. He spent 14 years at FourFourTwo as the Global Digital Editor and continues to regularly contribute to the magazine and website, including major features on Euro 96, Subbuteo, Robert Maxwell and the inside story of Liverpool's 1990 title win. He is also a Bolton Wanderers fan.

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