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Life moves on, times change, and nowhere is this truer than the childhood experience of following football. Now we have YouTube channels, thousands of influential fan accounts on X, not to mention clubs setting themselves up as media channels in their own right.
Wind back a few decades and even top-flight football seems almost amateurish in comparison, before the TV-fuelled wave of money hit the game with the birth of the Premier League in 1992.
Here’s what you’ll remember if you were a football-obsessed kid in the 1980s or 1990s - desperate for any and all scraps of football knowledge and action.
1. Elton Welsby hosted The Big Match Live on ITV
I think it can be argued that the decline of the UK started when ITV lost the contract to show live top-flight games in the UK (and our fate was doomed when Champions League games became pay-per-view). Elton Welsby was literally a fixture of Sunday afternoon living rooms in the latter part of the 1980s as the presenter of The Big Match Live on ITV . The advent of the Premier League and Sky sadly changed everything. | ITV Photo: ITV
2. Grandstand
Grandstand used to be required watching, when it was a sports behemoth. Football Focus was only a small part before it was spun off, as was Final Score. A fond memory of Final Score is having descriptions of the games read out while be-mulleted footballers' headshots were flashed up ('Jan Molby scored twice for Liverpool as they beat Sheffield Wednesday', say) against a soft-pop musical accompaniment - often an instrumental version of The Way It Is by Bruce Hornsby and the Range, or something by Jan Hammer | BBC Photo: BBC
3. Unofficial merchandise
I'm saying that non-hooky merch doesn't exist now, but in years past it was perfectly acceptable to rip off clubs' names, branding, and logos etc as nobody cared. Now, they are living and breathing copyright machines. | Tom Morton/NationalWorld Photo: Tom Morton/NationalWorld
4. Daytime radio commentary
Post-Heysel, English clubs were banned from European competition, only being let back in for the 1990/91 season. The fact that many eastern European clubs did not have floodlights led to daytime kick-offs in near-deserted stadia in the early 1990s - Manchester United's game away against Legia Warsaw in the semi-final of the European Cup Winners' Cup in 1991 was certainly one which needed a radio-Walkman spirited into school to keep up with the score... there was no other way. | YouTube/@gr8footy Photo: YouTube/@gr8footy