| Did The Premier League Kill The Game As A Working Man's Sport 09:02 - Feb 7 with 352 views | SaintNick |
This was a a suggestion on the home page article, "Who killed the magic of the FA Cup for Southampton".
I would suggest not !
The game was dead on it's feet by the mid 80's, a combination of football club owners who did not give a toss about the fans, having to watch games in decaying old stadiums, often on open terraces with no roof and the actual danger of attending matches when football hooliganism meant that anyone was fair game for a punch in the mouth, had seen attendances plummet from the 1970's.
Take 1988/89 even the big clubs were struggling
Man Utd Average 36k 10 yrs earlier average 56k
Liverpool Average 38k 1979 average 46k
Chelsea Average 15k 1979 average 24k
Spurs average 24k 1979 average 34k
Arsenal 35k 1979 average 36k (They were champions in 1989)
Saints average 15k 1979 average 21k
Football was dying and dropping, hence the Premier League came in and changed the face of the game .
So did the Premier League finish the game as a working mans sport, I would say no, it was already in the morgue when the Premier league came along, so the Premier League might not have reinvented it as a cheap working mans sport, but it saved it as a sport and made it a game that everyone followed albeit many on TV and the lower league clubs benefitted from this as the average person was now taking an interest in the game as a whole.
So the Premier League was the saviour of the game, but that came at a high cost as we now find out 33 years later.
I write this through gritted teeth as i am no lover of the Premier League and what it has become, but without it the game might well have died.
Discuss
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| Satisfying The Bloodlust Of The Masses In Peacetime |
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| Did The Premier League Kill The Game As A Working Man's Sport on 09:27 - Feb 7 with 317 views | saintwizzler |
It’s said that if Rangers and Celtic left the Scottish League then it would kill it due to the money they bring in.
Would the same happen if the big 7 left The Premier League.
It wouldn’t be the PL without them.
It would morph into The Championship Plus.
The only hope clubs of our stature are to compete, or even stay, in the PL is to spend big AND spend well.
Fulham, Brentford, Bournemouth, Forest, Brighton, Palace are all around or smaller sized clubs than us and they will be playing in the top tier next season, Forest and Bournemouth even Europe.
This mess we find ourselves in is down to the owners and no one else.
Quite what their plan, if they have one, is god only knows.
But in answer to the question.
No it’s opened it up to working men to watch top level football albeit on TV.
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| We thought that we had the answers,
It was the questions we had wrong. |
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| Did The Premier League Kill The Game As A Working Man's Sport on 10:06 - Feb 7 with 274 views | felly1 |
I think the concept that the Premier league has made football worse is a fallacy of the older fan.
As Wizzler says, Brentford, Forest , Bournemouth and so on show you can compete in the top league if you have very good owners, manager, recruitment and luck.
Football is massively more popular with a whole swathe of the population of the planet. ..rich and poor , old and young and both sexes...... these really are the good old days now. |  | | |
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