How this whole new ball game changed us forever

The game had been here before, countless times in fact with the first suggestions of a breakaway competition as an antidote to the ills of the game having come as far back as the Sixties.

So why, fans asked as the FA broke cover with a plan for an 18-team competition independent from the Football League, would this new idea be any different?

Certainly, this was a view subscribed to by the then Football League president Bill Fox whose response to the proposal was to state boldly: “This will not happen.”

Fox, chairman of Blackburn Rovers, went on to accuse the FA of trying to “hijack the First Division”, while the Professional Footballers’ Association also waded in to what fast became a row to express reservations about the proposals, along with the Football Supporters’ Federation.

By the following month, questions were being asked as to whether the FA’s insistence that the aim of the new competition was, as Lancaster Gate had claimed from the outset, to improve the standard of the England national team after it emerged that chairman Bert Millichip and chief executive Graham Kelly had not even reached agreement on whether an 18-team format was wanted or 22.

From a distance of more than two decades and just a month or so after the signing of a truly phenomenal three-year television deal that will net the League more than £3bn from live domestic rights alone, concerns as to whether the breakaway competition could be a success look so far wide of the mark they could be an effort on goal by Geoff Thomas when sporting an England shirt.

Not only has the competition thrived on the domestic front to such an extent that attendances have shot up by well over 50 per cent but it is now broadcast to more than 650 million homes in 212 territories around the world.

The same few big spending clubs may dominate with Manchester City having last season become only the fifth club to have their name inscribed on the base of the trophy as winners.

But the Premier League remains hugely competitive with last season – surely the craziest in the top flight for a generation – underlining why broadcasters continue to fall over themselves in an attempt to get involved.

Not only was Sergio Aguero’s late, late strike on the final day to seal City’s first title in 44 years the most dramatic event in English football since Michael Thomas broke Liverpool hearts at Anfield in 1989 but the entire campaign was littered by some truly astonishing results.

Who, before a ball had been kicked in anger last August, could have predicted that within three months Manchester United would have veered from the high of an 8-2 victory to a 6-1 humbling on their own patch at the hands of their noisy neighbours? Ditto Arsenal bouncing back from that hammering at Old Trafford to put five past a Chelsea side who a few months later would overcome Barcelona and Bayern Munich to be crowned European champions for the first time.

Even once the on-field action was over and supporters felt able to get their breath back, along came Tottenham Hotspur’s dismissal of Harry Redknapp to provide one final unexpected twist to an amazing nine months.

More of the same next year would go down very nicely, even if, once again, there will be no representative from Yorkshire among the 20 member clubs.

It is a sad state of affairs, not least because this will be the third year in a row that the White Rose has been absent – the first time this has happened since the early 20th Century when association football first started to make inroads into a county that, until then, had been dominated by rugby league.

At a time when Lancashire has boasted as many as eight clubs in recent seasons thanks to the exploits of Burnley and Blackpool, it is a shameful statistic and one made to look even worse by the fact four of our clubs kicked off the first campaign of the new competition in 1992-93. One of those – Leeds United – were also the reigning champions.

And as if that is not enough to get supporters in the region muttering into their pint, Sheffield Wednesday also finished third in the final season of the old First Division and Steel City rivals United ninth, while Middlesbrough won promotion from the second tier as runners-up. In the years that followed, three more – Barnsley, Bradford and Hull City – joined the party, while the Blades managed to become the only White Rose club to go down and then, after a 12-year absence, come back up again. These brief spells at the top table, however, do not make the county’s on-going struggles any more palatable.

With six sides from within the Broad Acres in the Championship next season, the hope has to be that the county’s barren run can come to an end soon. The alternative, especially with the new lucrative television deal due to start in a little over a year, is that Yorkshire becomes even more of a footballing backwater, lagging further and further behind the elite.

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