You have probably heard it all before. Sometime in the Nineties the people’s game was hijacked by the middle classes who then proceeded to price poor fans out of the market, sucked the atmosphere out of the stadiums and transformed football into the Sky-funded leviathan it is today.

The Sky revolution had a massive impact on the game but the catalyst for it can be traced back to two pivotal events which took place almost two decades ago. Firstly, go back to April 1989 and the Hillsborough Disaster which in turn led to the Taylor Report. The recommendations from this have meant that many new grounds have been built or old ones have been altered beyond all recognition. Just over a year after the tragedy and it was the turn of Italia ‘90. England’s unexpectedly good performance there helped give a much broader fan base to a game that had been struggling to come to terms with itself since the exclusion of our clubs post-Heysel in 1985. The sublime skills of Gazza and the all-round performance of the team meant that, for once, English football was making headlines for all the right reasons.

Six years later and Euro ‘96 provided the bookend to a period in which the game had belatedly caught up with the back end of the Twentieth Century and had almost reached its zenith in terms of mass appeal. During this time the Premier League was born, football was re-invented and repackaged via the aforementioned Sky and the success of books like Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch hinted at the gentrification of a pastime which had been embraced largely by the working classes since the moment it broke free from its English public school origins in the nineteenth century. So, was football stolen from its rightful custodians? And has the game been drastically altered for the worse as a result of that theft? I’m not so sure. Think back to the various stages of the expansion of the Champions League and all the fears that were mooted along the way. Domestic football was set to suffer, with the League and FA Cups being the major victims. But those fears have turned out to be largely unfounded with the major clubs not only taking the FA Cup as seriously as ever but also attaching a new found importance to the League Cup. The Carling Cup finals of recent years bare witness to this.

I agree with those that point to some of the ills that are prevalent in the modern game. In a lot of grounds, not least St. James’ Park, young fans have difficulty in affording tickets for games. Something needs to be done about this by the clubs, if only for selfish reasons, to ensure that the next generation of supporter will come through the turnstiles. The rise of the corporate ‘fan’, often perceived as being more concerned with the free buffet on offer than the game they are attending, is also something that many find hard to accept. Moreover, there are too many live games on television and there is a justifiable feeling that this will lead to a backlash (if it hasn’t done so already). And of course that is to mention nothing of average Premiership squad players earning more in a fortnight than most fans earn in a year. This last point hints at possibly the greatest crisis currently facing fooball, with nowhere near enough of the money being poured into the game finding its way down to football at grassroots level.

These downsides are mainly borne out of the need to by each club to generate as much revenue as possible though, with being successful on the pitch never having been so directly linked to this. And football in this country had to change. Ignoring the problems caused by the archaic stadiums and the draconian treatment of the ‘English disease’ had come home to roost with tragic consequences. And would anyone really want it to go back to the way it was? Yes, many of us do miss the atmosphere which is now often lacking, but look at the situation in Italy, where grounds that were brand new or revamped for Italia ‘90 have now been allowed to fall into disrepair. Couple this with the policing of matches there, which is nothing short of a disgrace, and you have a recipe for disaster as this season has demonstrated.

So, for all the rights and wrongs of the current era, football is still the one sport that captures the imagination more than any other. It may no longer be the preserve of the young working class male but, in some ways at least, that is a good thing. Cast your mind back to the Eighties and the case of Bobby Moore, arguably England’s greatest ever player. His stock had fallen so far that he was reduced to writing columns for the recently launched, and universally derided, Daily Sport. Compare that now with the way in which he is (albeit posthumously) celebrated by his statue taking pride of place at the new Wembley and how, in recent years, he has once again had bestowed upon him the iconic status that a national hero of his ilk deserves. This suggests to me a change in the position of football in the collective national consciousness in the last twenty years or so. We are all allowed to feel we can be fans now and that can only be a good thing for the long term future of the sport in this country.