Fever Pitch: The Rise of the Premier League

The Football Association has approved controversial plans to set up a new super league.

On he goes!

When Murdoch wrote the cheque,

everyone said, "Poor old Rupert's lost it this time."

How big it was gonna be, I don't think anyone could have predicted.

20,000 fans surrounded St James's Park

to welcome the world's most expensive footballer.

I would love it if we beat them. Love it!

When the seagulls follow the trawler,

they think sardines will be thrown.

It's just all money. Each club is one big theme park now.

Footballers became sort of like rock stars overnight.

I don't think anything prepares you for media attention at such a young age.

I look at myself and think, "What an arsehole."

'Cause I'd let everything go to my head.

I've got a choice in life now.

I either go back to the booze

and the gambling and the drugs or I go the other way.

It's like a religion.

It's something to believe in.

Three, two, one...

Doing a documentary for the BBC

on the Premier League in the '90s.

I know I definitely wouldn't have been able to do that.

Yeah, let's go. Okay?

Yeah.

Here's McGrath.

Oof, Vinnie Jones caught him there.

When I first played,

there was a lot more crunching tackles

that you could get away with.

You're fighting for every game,

every tackle, every header every second.

We were more of a borstal

than a football team.

People will go on YouTube and look stuff up,

and they'll go, "You was a lunatic!"

And I'll go, "Yeah. I was a bit lively, yeah."

Dreadful scenes at Kenilworth Road.

Absolutely disgraceful.

Football was going nowhere in the '80s.

You know, let's be honest, you know?

There was such bad press, stadiums were empty,

and I think people were scared to go to football matches. They were scared.

It was football violence, football violence, football violence.

There were quite often fights on the forecourt, you know, regularly.

And your dad was pulling me and Phil through at the age of five and six.

It wasn't an environment for the family to attend.

At that time, it was like

all these intercity firms going down the tube station

for a punch-up.

In the 1980s, football was a source of shame.

Ordinary fans were turning their back on the once beautiful game.

The Sunday Times branded it a "slum sport"

watched by "slum people" in "slum stadiums".

I'll show you this graph.

After we won the World Cup in 1966,

attendances were at a high of something like 30 million.

And by 1986, they had declined to 17 million.

Had that been Tesco supermarkets or Boots chemists or Rank cinemas,

they'd have had to have done something very dramatic to stop going out of business.

Football was not glamorous

and there was no television income of any consequence.

So nobody could ever say it was a well-run business 'cause it wasn't.

At that time, I was working for The Independent,

which was a new newspaper start-up,

and the World Cup in 1990 changed our view

of how the game could be reported,

what we could see in it.

And it produced amazing characters.

The emotional highs and lows of Italia '90

marked a turning point for English football.

Different types of people suddenly started watching.

Football was bringing the nation together.

And chipped in, and volleyed in!

And it's there by David Platt!

And Bobby Robson... ecstatic.

And what happened in 1990 was

you had the added drama of those penalty shoot-outs.

I remember being with friends and them having to leave the room

while the penalties were going on.

And England are out of the World Cup.

West Germany are through to the final on penalty kicks.

We played a major part in the tournament.

We've done very well to get to the semis,

and we can go home, you know, feeling very proud, I think.

When England finally bowed out,

the match was witnessed by a UK television audience of more than 25 million.

Lights were going on in brains

amongst the next generation of media moguls,

realizing, "Hang on. This is something very, very powerful.

And if we get this right, there's money here."

With the prospect of bringing fans back to the game,

a new breed of business-minded chairmen

sensed the time was ripe for a sporting revolution.

I was in the commodity business actually trading physical sugar,

and I built up my own business, and it was going fairly well.

A group of us got together who were more progressive than others

and said, you know, it's time to change.

My own personal motto is the motto of the turtle.

You don't get anywhere unless you stick your neck out.

Being young and enthusiastic,

we sort of thought, well, things need to change.

We all realized that, really, under the 92 old football league formula,

the big clubs in England were never really going to reach their full potential.

The big five, the two Liverpool clubs, Liverpool and Everton,

the two north London clubs, Arsenal and Spurs... and United...

got together, had this unofficial cartel,

and they were trying to work out ways that they could grab more of the take.

We had a famous meeting, and the plot was laid to break away.

The Football League had been going since the 1880s or something...

over a hundred years... and all of a sudden, here we come, five of us decide

here's the four divisions of 92 clubs.

We're gonna take the top division of 22 clubs at the time

and break away, form a whole new legal entity,

rebrand ourselves, reinvent ourselves,

call ourselves the Premier League and start again.

Good evening. The Football Association has approved controversial plans

to set up a new super league, but the decision looks certain to cause a rift within the game.

Upsetting. Ah, more divisive,

and bringing all the aggro to the fore again.

The elite clubs will set up their own premier division

enabling them to keep more of the profits from sponsorship and television.

That may not worry the fans of Arsenal, Spurs and the rest,

but what about the likes of Oxford, Southend and Gillingham?

It's a difficult thing to change anything that's been going for over a hundred years,

and of course there was a lot of resistance.

This is the last thing that the man in the streets wants or even understands.

I thought it was all about 22 men kicking the ball about.

You know, I could be radically wrong in that situation.

That guy, and I don't want to talk badly about him,

but he was chairman of the Football League,

and he said, "It's always been like this, for over a hundred years.

You can't change it now."

Oh, really? Well, you know what? A hundred years ago, buses were drawn by horses.

Five, four, three...

...two, one and cue.

We're on BBC.

The new founders were staking the success of their breakaway league

on selling TV rights to live matches.

And just as they were looking for broadcast partners,

television was going through its own revolution.

Programmes beamed from outer space, the shape of television to come.

In February, you'll be able to pick up programmes from the Astra satellite.

Now to do it, you'll need this.

This is a dish, shallow curve there, made by Amstrad.

Costs about £200 on sale at Christmas.

I remember it vividly.

-The phone rang. -

Rupert Murdoch wanted to see me.

To me, Rupert was a mystical figure.

It was like following Gandalf the Grey.

Gandalf the Grey, though,

wearing glasses like the windscreen of a Ford Cortina.

Rupert Murdoch was attempting

to expand his media empire with the launch of a new network,

Sky Television.

Rupert Murdoch has officially launched his bid

to win over Britain's television viewers.

He plans four new satellite television channels.

The man may own more newspapers and more television stations than anyone on Earth...

I've been a television news reporter for 40 years.

I was at that event when Murdoch launched Sky,

and I remember, um, rather nervously

asking him, "Will the standards of journalism on Sky be the same as in your newspapers?

Fabrication and lies and obsession with people's private lives?"

And everybody was absolutely stunned.

Is it going to be the same kind of standard of journalism as we see in those newspapers?

It'll be totally different. I've told you it will be absolutely first class.

-Thank you. -And there was huge scepticism

about whether it would ever work and whether people would pay to subscribe to new channels

when they already had several channels to watch.

I suppose the worry about it was that Sky would monopolise football on television

and therefore we wouldn't get to watch it on Match of the Day

or on the ITV equivalent.

At the time the Premier League was forming,

Sky was in a fairly perilous financial state.

We'd been losing a lot of money... couple million quid a week...

and we had a tiny, little viewing audience.

Initially, Rupert Murdoch's idea was

that films would be the driver of that.

You'd subscribe rather than go into the cinema and you'd get new movies.

But when they launched, there wasn't much take-up. People weren't that interested.

They realized that sport might be the way of doing it if we could get into sport.

Then I went looking to every sporting body in the UK

to try and pick up rights that weren't being used.

And, obviously, football was top of the list.

Getting the Premier League became that pot of gold that we desperately needed.

Football's new Premier League has struck a £300 million deal,

which means its matches will only be seen live on satellite TV.

If fans wanted to watch live matches,

they'd have to pay £200 for a dish and a monthly subscription on top.

When Mr. Murdoch wrote the cheque to the football league,

everyone said, "Oh, my God!

Poor old Rupert's lost it this time.

He's paid too much money."

The pound signs were ringing

in the eyes of the football club chairmen.

It was transformational the amount of money that was being offered by Sky.