One of the lesser known but more frequently thumbed tomes on my bookshelf is something called The Premier League Handbook. Published in the summer of 1992 before the launch of a zippy new competition called the FA Premier League and competitively priced at £3.99, it’s a nostalgic and richly comic artefact, a sepia-tinted window into the hoopla and razzmatazz that greeted English football’s brave new dawn.
And so in among the usual season previews (Dean Saunders and Jason Dozzell were among the “players to watch” that year) was a six-page feature on an upstart young broadcaster called Sky Sports, which was promising to reinvent the way we watched football and not the least reticent about it. Sky, we were told, would bring with them “space-age gadgetry” and “computer graphics”. Tension would be heightened by – and I quote – “a clock running constantly in one corner of the screen”. It was, in so many ways, a more innocent age.
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