Читать книгу The Mixer: The Story of Premier League Tactics, from Route One to False Nines онлайн

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There were other tragedies. A fortnight before the Heysel disaster, 56 people were killed at Bradford City’s Valley Parade by a fire that engulfed an entire stand within minutes. Four years later, grave policing errors at Hillsborough resulted in the deaths of 96 people, a tragedy subsequently blamed, consistently and incorrectly, upon supporters.

In the aftermath of the Bradford fire a leading article in the Sunday Times described football as ‘a slum sport played in slum stadiums, increasingly watched by slum people’. It was a desperately distasteful description, but serves as a useful low-water mark for measuring English football’s subsequent development. Slum people? The problem of hooliganism was largely defeated in the years that followed. Slum stadiums? The Taylor Report recommended all-seater grounds, and the Premier League’s formative years were dominated by new or dramatically renovated stadiums. Slum sport? English football changed enormously during the Premier League era, its popularity rising dramatically, first within England and then across the world.