My grandfather used to say football was “better before the money. He said it about the 1970s, the 1990s and, I’m fairly sure, would say it about today too. Every generation thinks the game was purer when it was younger. What’s funny is that the story of the Premier League is, in a lot of ways, a story about money. But it’s also about fans, disasters, stubborn club chairmen, a satellite dish and one very persuasive Scotsman who wrote a letter in 1888.
If you want to understand why English football looks the way it does now, you have to go back a lot further than 1992. So let’s start at the beginning.
The Football League began in 1888
By the late 1880s, football in England had rules, thanks to the Football Association, which was formed in 1863. What it didn’t have was a proper competition. Clubs played friendlies and cup ties, and fixtures were cancelled all the time. It was chaotic, and for clubs that had started paying their players, it was also bad for business.
William McGregor, a draper from Scotland who ran Aston Villa, had an idea. In March 1888 he wrote to a handful of leading clubs suggesting they play each other home and away on fixed dates every season. A month later, at a meeting in Manchester, the Football League was born.
Twelve clubs signed up: Accrington, Aston Villa, Blackburn Rovers, Bolton Wanderers, Burnley, Derby County, Everton, Notts County, Preston North End, Stoke, West Bromwich Albion and Wolverhampton Wanderers. Every one of them came from the north or the Midlands. London didn’t get a look in.
The first season kicked off in September 1888, and Preston North End won it without losing a single game. They also won the FA Cup that year without conceding a goal. People called them “The Invincibles” long before Arsenal borrowed the nickname more than a century later.
That basic format of clubs playing each other twice, with points for results, has barely changed since. It’s worth pausing on that. Almost everything else in the game has been transformed, but McGregor’s idea is still sitting at the heart of every Premier League season. The Football Association still governs the wider English game, even though the top division now runs itself.
The dark years before the breakaway
You can’t talk honestly about 1992 without talking about the decade before it. English football in the 1980s was in a bad way. Crowds were falling, grounds were crumbling and hooliganism had become a national embarrassment.
Then came tragedy after tragedy. The Bradford City fire in 1985. The Heysel disaster the same year, after which English clubs were banned from European competition. And in 1989, Hillsborough, where 97 Liverpool supporters lost their lives.
The Taylor Report that followed Hillsborough changed everything. It called for all seater stadiums at the top level, and clubs suddenly needed huge sums of money to rebuild their grounds. At roughly the same time, England’s run to the World Cup semi finals at Italia 90 reminded the country why it loved the game in the first place. Interest was coming back. The money wasn’t. Something had to give.
The 1992 breakaway and TV money
The biggest clubs had grown tired of sharing television income with the 92 members of the Football League. They wanted a bigger slice, and they wanted to negotiate their own deals. With backing from the FA, the clubs in the old First Division resigned from the Football League and formed a new competition. The FA Premier League was founded in 1992, and its first season began that August with 22 clubs.
The deal that made it all possible was with BSkyB, worth around £304 million over five years. That sounds modest now. Back then, it was staggering, and it was many times what the old First Division had been earning.
On the pitch, the first goal in Premier League history was scored by Brian Deane of Sheffield United against Manchester United. United recovered from that opening day defeat and went on to win the first title, ending a 26 year wait for a league championship. Alex Ferguson’s side would go on to dominate the next two decades.
In 1995 the league cut itself down to 20 clubs, which is the size it has stayed ever since.
How Sky Sports changed English football
It’s hard to explain to younger fans how different football on television looked before 1992. Live league matches were rare. Highlights were short. Saturday at 3pm was sacred, and it still is in the UK, where games at that time aren’t shown live.
Sky threw all of that out. There were Monday night games, which people genuinely thought were a strange American idea. There were fireworks before kickoff and cheerleaders on the pitch, some of which, thankfully, didn’t last. There were more cameras, more analysis and more build up than anyone had ever seen.
Fixtures started spreading across the whole weekend so more matches could be broadcast. Fans complained about moved kickoff times then, and they still complain now. But the money kept rising with every new TV contract, and that money went into wages, transfers and stadiums. You can argue about whether it was good for the soul of the game. You can’t argue that it didn’t change it.
Global growth of the league
If Sky built the house, the rest of the world moved in.
Eric Cantona arrived at Manchester United in 1992 and showed what a foreign star could do in English football. In 1995 the Bosman ruling allowed out of contract players to move freely within the European Union, and clubs started signing players from all over the continent. A year later, Arsène Wenger arrived at Arsenal and quietly changed how English clubs trained, ate and played.
Then came the owners. Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea in 2003 and poured money into the club, and other wealthy investors followed. Manchester City’s takeover in 2008 turned a club that had spent years in the shadow of its neighbours into a powerhouse.
Along the way, the league produced moments that travelled the world. Arsenal’s unbeaten season in 2003/04. Agüero’s last minute title winner in 2012. And my favourite, Leicester City winning the league in 2015/16 after starting the season as 5,000 to 1 outsiders. No other major league in the world has a story quite like that one.
Today the Premier League is broadcast in close to 200 countries, and it’s the most watched football league on the planet. The official Premier League website reaches fans from Lagos to Lahore to Lapland, which is not something McGregor could have imagined when he sat down to write his letter.
The league today
The 2026/27 campaign is the 35th season of the Premier League. Twenty clubs, 38 games each, 380 matches in total. Three clubs go down at the end, and three come up from the Championship.
The recent history has been dominated by Manchester City, who won four titles in a row under Pep Guardiola. Liverpool broke that run in 2024/25, and last season Arsenal finally won the league for the first time in 22 years, pipping City on the final day. Guardiola then left the club, and Enzo Maresca has taken charge at the Etihad.
There are new faces lower down too. Coventry City are back in the top flight for the first time since 2001, alongside Ipswich Town and Hull City. And with several big clubs starting fresh under new managers, the balance of power feels less certain than it has for years.
The way fans follow the league has changed as well. Hardly anyone waits for the evening paper anymore. People check scores on their phones mid match, argue about VAR on social media and keep a live table open while half watching the game. Fans in Finland, for instance, can follow the whole thing in their own language on Valioliiga.org, which tracks the standings, results and fixtures and even has a short section on the history of the league. The Guardian’s Premier League coverage is another good place to read the stories behind the results, especially if you like your football with a bit of opinion on the side.
What 130 years of history actually tells us
When I look back over the whole timeline, a few things stand out.
The first is that big change in English football almost always follows a crisis. The Football League was created because fixtures were a mess. The Premier League came out of disaster, crumbling stadiums and financial panic. Even many of today’s debates about finances and regulation are really about how to protect the game from its own excesses.
The second is that the core of the game is remarkably stubborn. Home and away. Points for wins. Promotion and relegation. Twelve clubs in 1888 would recognise the basic shape of this season’s league, even if they’d be baffled by the wages, the stadiums and the fact that people in Finland watch it on their phones.
And the third? My grandfather was partly right. There is more money now. But there are also safer stadiums, better football and more people watching it than ever before. I’m not sure “better before the money” is quite the verdict history gives.
Whatever you think of the modern Premier League, it didn’t appear out of nowhere in 1992. It’s the latest chapter in a story that started with one letter, twelve clubs and a very simple idea. Not bad for a draper from Scotland.
