In the mid 80s, English football was in deep crisis. For years those in charge of the game and the clubs themselves had invested very little into the game. At the center of all of this were the fans, and being a football fan in 1985 was similar to admitting that you spent Saturday afternoons fighting dogs, it was something to be slightly ashamed of.
Football supporters themselves had an appalling reputation. Some saw fights between home and away supporters as part of the game. Looking back this fight sub-culture had been around for at least a couple of decades, the difference was the media took notice of it and splashed it across the front pages. I recall the Daily Mirror newspaper published a tongue in cheek “English-Spanish phrase book for hooligans” prior to the World Cup in 1982.
It all changed in 1985. On May 11 a wooden stand at Bradford City caught fire and 56 died as a result because of inadequate training of stewards, crown control fencing and locked exit doors. While this tragedy had nothing to do with hooligans, it fitted into the emerging media picture of football grounds as a place of danger. I went to a game at Aldershot the following Saturday and I’ve never experienced an atmosphere quite like it.
Just a couple of weeks later Liverpool and Juventus fans clashed inside the Heisel stadium before the European Cup Final. 39 people were killed and 454 injured, most of them Juventus fans. The subsequent report put the blame primarily on the Liverpool fans, but went on to say the terrible state of the stadium and the inaction of the police had been serious contributing factors to the disaster.
These events along with the media coverage of the hooligan problem gave the government all the moral authority to act to rid the game of what the newspapers named “the English disease”
The government proposed a scheme that required anyone attending a football game would first have to acquire an identity card. This was unprecedented in a country that even today people do not routinely carry any form of picture ID. The Thatcher government assumed there would barely any opposition to their idea from a football fans themselves, a group it regarded as uneducated, apolitical and unorganized.
The game itself was in no to position to argue. Spectator numbers as well as television viewing figures had fallen dramatically during the past few years. The BBC and ITV, had reduced their football coverage and very few investors were willing to put any money at all into the sport.
The renaissance of the sport came from two rather unlikely sources. First the supporters, for possibly the first time there was something that required them to come together to defend the sport. This change was huge and millions of supporters spoke with a single voice.
This single voice was aided by the growing number of football fanzines, Fan produced magazines that could be irreverent, critical about underperforming players, gave real interviews and told it how it is. Realistically maybe a couple of thousand people who spent their Saturdays in the shed end really cared how defender Glen Burvil was still being picked week-in-week out for Aldershot Town (speculation at the time was that he had pictures of manager Len Walker with a couple of sheep), but there was photocopied fanzine for us to disagree with.
Today fanzines have largely gone from the game with one notable exception, When Saturday Comes. WSC still has some of the edgy, irreverent coverage of the game, but it also has consistently good writing and a great understanding of the world game at all levels. For fans of the game it’s well worth the money for a subscription (www.wsc.co.uk).
The second (and even more unlikely place) was Rupert Murdoch and his fledgling satellite broadcasting company, Sky. Rupert Murdoch was one of the three or four media tycoons that controlled the newspapers in the UK and one of his papers, The Sun, were probably the most vocal critic of the fan and supported the introduction of ID cards.
Murdoch satellite channels needed something that would get people to buy dishes and subscribe to premium channels. Sky successfully went after football and signed lucrative deals to show live games on Friday night and Sunday afternoon. Sky put money into the game, a lot of money. The premier league was formed and 15 years later it was by far the richest league in the world.