A WHOLE NEW BALL GAME

The first live Football League match was transmitted by the ITV in September 1960, but it didn't go too well. The BIG GAME between Blackpool and Bolton was awful with cameras positioned behind the goals and TV only showed the match from the last five minutes of the first half, to the final whistle.

Stanley Matthews, my hero and a star man at the time, did not play (he tended to choose his matches in those days and might have reckoned the Bolton full backs a bit rough!) claiming to be "injured". The viewing figures were low and within weeks, the contract between broadcaster and league was scrapped.

It took another 23 years for another league game to be televised; ITV showed Tottenham vs Nottingham Forest in October 1983. but football did not gain much financially from this arrangement, as the operators acted as a "cartel", keeping the price low. When the administrators tried to hold out for more money, in 1986, the game was taken off the screens for six months before the League went "cap in hand" to take the £4.5m offered. But things were changing.

The introduction of satellite television meant that the BBC and ITV were not the only "players". British SKY Broadcasting made a £99m ten year bid for league rites in 1988 which led to ITV breaking from the BBC and offering £44m for 4 years. ITV won the bid! partly because the larger clubs in the League would pocket the "prize" which had previously been split between all thre league members...92 of them!

With this deal, the "Super League seeds had been sown". In 1991, the FA Premier League was founded and launched in 1992 after the ITV's deal had "run out". ITV bid £262m for the new Premier League TV contract and looked to have won it. But, Alan Sugar, Spurs' Chairman and the Amstrad satellite dish manufacturer!!! was screaming",,,,"You have got to blow them out of the water!" Hours later, SKY tabled a £304m bad and won the contract. 

That August, Teddy Sheringham shot past David James to score SKY's first live goal and the new era was begun!  James recalls that he was one of two debutants for Liverpool, having joined the club from Watford earlier that summer.

Little did the £1 million signing – or anyone else for that matter – realise what an historic moment he was part of, or that it would be the first of his 572 Premier League appearances, more than any other goalkeeper in the competition’s history.

Promoted as "The Greatest Show on Earth", the Premier League is the most-watched football league in the world, broadcast in 212 territories to 643 million homes and a potential TV audience of 4.7 billion people; The Premier League's production arm, Premier League Productions, is operated by IMG Productions and is responsible for producing all content for its international television partners.