“We have a marvellous product and it deserves to have a marvellous image"
The F.A. Blueprint for the Future of Football, June 1991
There was more to Sky’s early Premier League coverage than a live match every Sunday and Monday. They introduced a series of additional programmes with varying degrees of success. The Boot Room, presented by Andy Gray, was the first time English football came out as a tactical entity; the Footballers’ Football Show was essentially a pub chat among ex-pros.
Then there was Hold the Back Page, a wildly entertaining forerunner of Sunday Supplement. The format was the same but the atmosphere was not – instead of Sunday morning, it was shown on Friday or Saturday night. And instead of croissants and orange juice, there were glasses of water and a strident discourse that suggested something more robust had been on offer in the green room.
The programme was introduced at the start of the 1994-95 season. Had Sky known what would happen over the next nine months, they would have called it Hold the Front Page. For one year only, with no particular rhyme or reason, English football became the biggest scandal in town. The 1994-95 season became known as the Season of Sleaze – or, as FourFourTwo magazine put it, The Year Football Went MAD!
