What if: Sky’s 1992 Premier League proposal never happened?

Some of the famous faces at the start of the Premier League era

The 1980s was a dark chapter in English football.

A nation struggling under the weight of Margaret Thatcher’s controversial policies had seen its national sport become a source of shame. Hooliganism, deaths in stadiums and a lacklustre national team made for a bleak decade.

The success of the late 1970s and early 1980s, when seven out of eight consecutive European Cups were won by an English side, seemed a distant memory when a banning order on English clubs from European football was passed in 1985, following the Heysel Stadium disaster. All of a sudden, the dark days had arrived. England’s largest clubs were even threatening to break away from the Football League, driving for greater revenue.

But when all hope seemed lost, a saviour emerged.

In come Sky Sports with a staggering £300m offer to buy the rights to live football. Fast-forward to 2025, the Premier League is by far the most reputable football league in the world, with a huge global reach and influence, in no small part due to players from all corners of the globe relocating to play their football in England, many earning a staggering 5- or 6-figure weekly wage.

In 2025, the league’s best player is Egyptian. Its young starlet is from Norway. Its greatest manager is Spanish. Its greatest influx of foreign fans come from South Korea. The owners of last season’s top 6 come from the likes of the Middle East and the USA.

When Uzbekistan’s Abdukodir Khusanov made his Premier League debut earlier this year for Manchester City, he made Uzbekistan the 126^th nation to be represented in the Premier League era.

If Sky hadn’t come in with this groundbreaking offer in the early 1990s, what would football, and society, look like in the 2020s?

 

If there’s anything that best encapsulates Britain’s multiculturism, it’s the Premier League. It is a melting pot of nations, cultures, languages and religions. But had it not been for a late twist of fate from a decade of ruin, we could have seen a sport unrecognisable to how we know it today.

If Sky had not helped create the Premier League, and instead English football had continued with the First Division as the top flight, the main product would be that football in England would be tradition-rich but money-poor. Without all the corporate influences of modern football, it is likely that clubs would be prouder of their origins, with locally rooted values and even local sponsors.

The main winners in this hypothetical scenario would be the working-class supporters. Without the corporate, commercialised game that we see today, with a global influence and demand unlike any other football league, ticket prices in 2025 would be much more affordable to fans of all backgrounds.

The lack of football on television would have a greater impact on the accessibility of the sport – at least in the era before streaming and social media. It may be the case that most of the matches, save for maybe one per week, would be played at the traditional kick-off time of 3pm on a Saturday.

Without the global appeal that the Premier League has nowadays, the huge global brands that offer sponsorship to Premier League clubs would instead have sought business in the biggest leagues at the time: Italy’s Serie A, La Liga in Spain and the German Bundesliga.

And without the necessary funds to renovate stadia in the country, after the Taylor report called for all top-flight grounds to be all-seaters by law after the Hillsborough tragedy, the stadia would remain old-fashioned. While the atmosphere of long-gone grounds such as Highbury, Upton Park and White Hart Lane would remain, these arenas would suffer from the lack of necessary maintenance over time.

 

There is an argument to say that the hyper-globalisation of the Premier League has influenced the views of the British public on issues such as immigration.

On a list of the greatest Premier League players of all time by FourFourTwo magazine, five out of the top 10 players, Eric Cantona, Kevin de Bruyne, Mohamed Salah, Cristiano Ronaldo and Thierry Henry, are not from the UK or Ireland. This is particularly striking, given that only 13 foreign players appeared in the league’s opening weekend in 1992.

The increased everyday visibility of players from many different nationalities on television and social media is a kind of parasocial contact that, in theory, can reduce innate prejudices among the general public. From paid subscriptions such as Sky and TNT Sports to free highlights shows such as Match of the Day and media such as TikTok videos or YouTube Shorts, football has never been more accessible.

This subsequently raises the question: had it not been for the 1992 Sky proposal, would we as a country be less accepting of immigration?

This globalisation, which symbolised the embrace of multiculturalism in the country, provoked unease for some Britons, who feared a loss of national identity. Football’s embrace of multiculturalism mirrored wider anxieties about globalisation – sentiments that may have resurfaced during the 2016 EU referendum.

 

Sky’s 1992 deal didn’t just revolutionise English football – it reshaped British society. The Premier League’s rise brought unprecedented wealth, diversity, and cultural influence, but also new avenues over identity and commercialisation. The story of British football since the 1990s shows how the Premier League represents the very best of a nation, an ideal that cuts across political divisions and still unites supporters every weekend.