Summer 1992. After years of political wrangling the biggest football clubs in the land had got their way. The Premier League had arrived and the football landscape in England had been changed forever.
Some things back then were very different. Leeds United, a second division team between 1982 and 1990, had just pipped Manchester United to the title under Howard Wilkinson. Southampton pulled out of an attempt to sign Everton’s England Under-21 winger Peter Beagrie because they were not prepared to match his salary, which, reported the papers, was “believed to be about £125,000 a year”. The backpass rule had just been introduced. Denmark were European champions. The Cup Winners’ Cup existed.
Other things are pretty familiar. England had been dismal in a major championship, going out in the group stages at Euro 1992. Ticket prices for 1992-93 rose by nearly 20% on the previous year, a result of clubs needing to pay for the ground improvements demanded in the Taylor report. While some baulked at wage demands, there was still a growing concern about escalating transfer spending, Blackburn having broken the British record to snap up Alan Shearer from Southampton for £3.6m and Chelsea spending a club record £2.1m to take Robert Fleck from Norwich. And Sky’s shifting of kick-off times brought fears of fan alienation.
Adding to this tumult was England’s new “don’t-call-it-a-breakaway-super-league” breakaway super league and it was far from universally approved. Smaller clubs feared extinction; the PFA felt it was a way for “leading clubs to seize virtually all the money, leaving the remaining clubs to wither and, for some, die”. Even the England manager was unconvinced. “I think a lot of this is based on greed,” said Graham Taylor at the time.
But it had been in the offing for a while, with the big clubs – in particular the “big five” of Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Everton and Tottenham – desperate for a bigger slice of a financial pie that was set to get much meatier with the arrival of satellite TV money. Formal support from a small-minded and short-sighted FA arrived in the summer of 1991 and, after an unsuccessful high court challenge from the Football League, the new mega-club cash-cow was up and ready for milking just a year later.
The first goal of this brave new era, though, was not scored by one of the ultra-elite. It was scored by a team whose presence among the then 22 runaways was something rather remarkable in itself and by a player who was a £40,000 signing from Doncaster. Sheffield United had been plummeting when Dave Bassett brought Brian Deane to the club in the summer of 1988. Four years later he would rise above the Manchester United defence to head home the first ever Premier League goal.
“The place was dead … there was not a corner of the club which hadn’t succumbed to an aura of impending doom,” wrote Bassett of his early impressions of a club that he joined in January 1988. By that stage, they were already heading towards relegation to Division Three. Demoralised and divided they ended up going down via a relegation play-off defeat to Bristol City. Memories of their drop into Division Four in 1981 echoed around Bramall Lane.
Bassett offered his resignation on the back of that disappointment but was told to stay on and turn the club around. Armed with a selection of misfits and outcasts, he did just that, masterminding back-to-back promotions. Deane and Tony Agana combined for 66 goals as the Blades surged out of Division Three and a return to the top flight for the first time since 1976 was secured with a 5-2 victory over Leicester City at Filbert Street on the final day of the 1989-90 season. That Sheffield Wednesday were relegated from the First Division on the same afternoon means 5 May 1990 remains a cherished date in the red half of the city. “BLADES GLORY – OWLS DOWN” was the front page headline of the day’s Green ‘Un.
But the return to the big time did not go as planned. Bassett’s newly-promoted Blades picked up four points from their first 16 matches – P16 W0 D4 L12 F7 A30. It was the worst start ever made to a top-flight season and, as Christmas approached, United were eight points adrift of second-bottom QPR. “If the Berlin Wall can fall, Major become prime minister and turtles rule the world, it is possible that Sheffield United will one day win a match,” began a Guardian match report of their defeat to Spurs in late November. Relegation seemed a certainty.
But the dam broke when Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest visited Bramall Lane on 22 December 1990 and were beaten 3-2. Luton were beaten 1-0 on Boxing Day and a seven-game winning streak in January, February and March took them clear of danger. Had the season started with that win over Forest the Blades would have finished second in the league come May. Instead they were simply safe with time to spare.
Their 1991-92 season started almost as badly for the Blades, with Bassett’s side winning one of their first dozen games and sitting a point outside the relegation zone at Christmas. With the boardroom a mess and fears over the future of the club’s star striker, supporters organised a demonstration against the board in the Bramall Lane car park after that one win – against Everton at home in September. The police called on Bassett to help calm the crowd, with the manager using a loudhailer to tell the protesters that: “I’m staying here, Deano’s going nowhere.” Another rally, this time from the team – United’s post-Christmas run would have seen them finish third had the season started with the turkey and trimmings – saw another mid-table finish, this time in ninth.
Against the odds, then, Sheffield United would be a founder member of the new Premier League and would go into it with the man who had spearheaded two promotion campaigns and two great escapes still leading the line. Deane is better remembered by some for his disappointing spell at Leeds and his late-career role as target-man for hire. In his early 20s as he was here, though, Deane was a different prospect – tall and powerful, yes, but quick and blessed with more technical ability than he is given credit for. His brilliant brace against Liverpool in March 1992 – the first of which was a stunning 45-yard lob after a bonkers Bruce Grobbelaar charge, the second a combination of pace, muscle and finesse – showcased all those abilities. His continued presence at the club came as a welcome surprise to supporters and the manager alike. “I had a sneaking suspicion that if a £1m carrot was dangled in front of our donkey of a board, they would follow it all the way to relegation,” writes Bassett in his autobiography, Settling the Score.
And while the new league system would eventually mean vast sums of money for all concerned, Bassett was still operating on a shoestring. United’s summer spending consisted of the £120,000 splurged on Preston goalkeeper Alan Kelly. On the opening day of the season the Blades first XI had cost roughly £1m to put together, the bulk of it on Glyn Hodges (whose £410,000 move from Crystal Palace had been part supporter-funded in 1991) and Paul Beesley (a £300,000 signing from Leyton Orient in 1990). Just over a week earlier Manchester United, having missed out on Alan Shearer, had spent £1m on Cambridge United’s Dion Dublin, who made his debut 69 minutes into the game at Bramall Lane.
In the buildup to the new campaign Bassett, always one for an unusual approach, had added something extra to the pre-season routine. “The players thought I had totally lost it when I told them we were going to have a Christmas party a few days before the start of the season,” he writes. “I ordered them all to turn up in Christmas gear and, to be fair to them, they all went along with it. We had a Bramall Lane suite decorated, a turkey, a visit from Father Christmas, the lot.”
The festive theme – inspired by the difference in United’s pre- and post-Christmas performances over the previous two seasons – went as far as the match programme, which featured on the front Bassett in full Santa Claus gear, a tinsel-festooned Deane and club captain Brian Gayle wearing a Christmas cracker hat and, slightly missing the intended tone, holding aloft an inflatable bee.
Manchester United, meanwhile, were still stinging from having missed out on the title to Leeds. Wilkinson’s championship had been secured on the penultimate weekend of the season in Sheffield, when the Blades had been beaten 3-2 in a borderline bizarre affair.
But five minutes into the season, the home side had the lead and a little slice of history. The goal itself was hardly a classic. Carl Bradshaw sent a long throw hurtling into the area, Clayton Blackmore got his defensive header all wrong and Deane reacted quicker than Gary Pallister to plant his header past Peter Schmeichel. Still it was, and always will be, the first – the scoring in the league for the Haves started off by the Have-Nots.
