“If this is the future of football, you can stuff it.”
A clip from 1994 showing experts making predictions for where football would be in 10 years recently resurfaced on social media, and fans online cannot believe how prescient some of their forecasts proved to be.
Arsenal fanzine editor Mike Collins was part of the trio on the viral clip and – along with the disappearance of fanzines – he predicted credit card entry to stadiums, a decline in “hardcore support” and a rise in “glory hunters”.
“I and all other old-style fans want no part of it at all,” he said.
While not all predictions have come to fruition, some were on the money.
Neil Duncanson, a former broadcast executive, predicted that, “television will run football completely in the next century”.
Meanwhile, Alex Fynn, an author and football consultant, divined that match-going fans would be seen by clubs as “incidental”.
“If they are part of the equation, it will only be because television companies want them to provide the spectacular background, so that they can bring their pictures into millions of homes,” he said.
These excerpts are taken from Standing Room Only, a BBC football programme that ran between 1991 and 1994.
BBC Sport caught up with Duncanson and Fynn to reflect on their Nostradamus moment – and get their take on where our national game will be 10 years from now.
“Tonight you’ll watch Barcelona against Newcastle United in the European Super League.”
In this clip from 1994, Standing Room Only made some big predictions about the future of football in the year 2004. #SuperLeaguepic.twitter.com/E5aSBsYKsu
— BBC Archive (@BBCArchive) April 19, 2021
‘Not rocket science’ to predict media landscape
In 1992, Sky won the rights to broadcast the newly established Premier League in a £304m five-year deal. Two years later, Duncanson predicted that the power broadcasters had over football would proliferate to an extent not yet seen.
“If you think television is too powerful in sport now, in 10 years’ time you won’t believe the control that they’ll have,” he said.
Duncanson also speculated that fans in 2004 would watch football through subscription and pay-per-view services.
“He’ll watch it on his own local Newcastle cable station because the BBC or ITV won’t be able to afford the rights to the game,” he said.
“The cable operator will have paid a fortune for it, but he knows he’ll get the money back from subscription.
“It’s probably going to be done on pay-per-view, so you’ll put a card and a number on your telephone, tap it in, five quid docked from your account, the game pops up.”
More three decades on, subscription-funded broadcasters continue to be the gatekeepers of top-flight English football.
In 2023, the Premier League agreed a record four-year £6.7bn domestic television deal for Sky and TNT to show up to 270 live games a season from 2025-26.
Reflecting on his original predictions, Duncanson said it “wasn’t rocket science” to see where things were going “if you followed the money”.
“Sky had changed the game by spending so much money on rights because it established them as a major satellite power, and they continue to this day,” he said.
Casting his eye towards the future, Duncanson sees the nature of subscription viewing changing.
“We’re all going to learn a new acronym: DTC – direct-to-customer,” he said.
“There is a bit of a push-back now with subscription prices rising, from football fans who say, ‘Why do I have to pay so much money? I don’t want to watch cricket or rugby or motorsport or whatever. I just want to watch my team play.'”
Taking its cue from the NFL, NBA and Formula 1, Duncanson believes the Premier League will increasingly evolve into a rights holder and broadcast platform.
“The Premier League next season are going to start their own channel in Singapore. If that’s a success, you can see that being rolled out into other territories,” he said.
“You’ll be watching ‘Premflix’ or ‘Fifa TV’ or ‘Uefa+’, or any of them who have got that level of valuable football.”
Football’s relationship with matchday fans
Fynn, who was involved in the creation of the Premier League through his work as a consultant for the Football Association, believes the increased emphasis on broadcast revenue and international audiences has led top-flight English clubs to deprioritise their traditional fanbases.
“A customer can take his business elsewhere. A fan cannot. The clubs knew that and they exploited it,” he said.
In a decade’s time, Fynn predicts that spiralling player wages would further impact match-going fans.
He said: “Demand exceeds supply and, on that basis, what clubs have done is to recognise there is more value in eliminating the so-called ‘legacy fans’ in place of the so-called ‘tourist fans’ – those who will come, pay a higher entry price, buy merchandise and therefore add to the bottom line.
“So long as the players are paid the amounts that they are, fans will have in some way to pick up the cost.”
Fynn praised the “enormous contributions” fans in England have made in the past decade, “through the Football Supporters’ Association (FSA), Supporters Direct and, most important of all, the fan-led review of football governance”.
That review led to the establishment last year of an independent football regulator in England.
“It is the regulator who will be the fans’ best hope for producing a system whereby they are not extorted,” Fynn said.
He speculated that Uefa’s spending caps may eventually influence the Premier League.
England’s top-flight clubs voted recently to move to a system called squad cost ratio (SCR), which allows clubs to spend up to 85% of their income on player wages, although this could rise to 115%.
Uefa’s SCR spending limit is 70%, which all clubs in the Champions League, Europa League and Conference League must adhere to.
Fynn said: “In due course we might have a more even playing field, in the sense that the clubs won’t be able to pay the players so much, whereby they won’t need to charge the fans so much for their ticket prices.
“But of course they will. As long as they can get away with it, they will.”
Future financing
Fynn believes that the devaluing of matchday revenue harms clubs in the lower tiers of English football.
“Ten years ago, matchday was all-important. Today broadcast is all-important,” he said.
“But matchday is absolutely vital for the small clubs. And yet, when you look at the leagues, every league – the Premier League, the Championship, League One and League Two – there are average losses for those leagues of millions and millions of pounds.
“It’s a system that cannot continue like this and if, for example, the owners pulled the plug on the smaller clubs, half of the EFL would go out of business tomorrow, as we’ve seen with clubs like Sheffield Wednesday.”
Wednesday entered administration in October last year and will start life in League One next year, after being relegated from the Championship, with a 15-point deduction.
This month, Chelsea announced the biggest pre-tax loss in Premier League history, with a £262m deficit for the 2024-25 season.
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