English football in the 1980s had a terrible image despite club's on-field success on the European stage with English clubs winning seven of eight European Cups from 1977 to 1984 hooliganism was rife in the game, with violence at away matches common, and aging stadiums had become unsafe for spectators. In the 1985 European Cup final between Liverpool and Juventus at Heysel Stadium in Belgium, 39 football supporters, mostly Italians, were killed in a crush when a wall in the stadium collapsed after fan violence. English fans were held responsible for the disaster and all English clubs were banned from European competition indefinitely.
The quarter of a century ago this month the Premier League barged into our consciousness on the surface it's just another name for the top division in English football for the change that the game has undergone in the last 25 years is at least in part down to the premium football in England almost looks like a different sport to the one that emerged into a new more glamorous and most prominently richer era in 1992 and it was money that started the whole thing in the early 1990s the biggest clubs in the land were dissatisfied with how the football league was running their affair even then when the commercial arm of most clubs extended to a sporadically staffed club shop they knew that they could get more for their money.
Teams | Founded | Top scorer | League champion | FA cup | League cup | Community shield |
Tottenham Hotspur | 1882 | J.Greaves (266goals) | 2 | 8 | 4 | 7 |
Manchester City | 1894 | S.Aguero (260goals) | 7 | 6 | 8 | 6 |
Arsenal | 1886 | T.Henery (228goals) | 13 | 14 | 2 | 16 |
Chelsea | 1905 | F.Lampard (211goals) | 6 | 8 | 5 | 4 |
Liverpool | 1892 | I.Rush (346goals) | 19 | 7 | 9 | 15 |
Manchester united | 1878 | W.Rooney (253goals) | 20 | 12 | 5 | 21 |
