From hooligans to heroes: How Italia 90 changed English football - How It All Played Out

0:01This is a Global Player Original Podcast. In the 1980s, English football was at an all-time low. The club sides might have been strong on the pitch, but off it, the game's reputation was in the mud. Attendances down, stadia crumbling, hooliganism known as the English disease all too prevalent, and then three horrific disasters, Bradford, Heysel and Hillsborough. Then almost out of nowhere, Bobby Robson and his band of characters came within the width of the post of reaching the World Cup final. England might have lost that semi-final against West Germany, but they won the hearts of a nation who fell in love with football once again.

0:46So just how did Italia 90 change English football? This is how it all played out.

1:00Paul, we're going back to our youth here. you and I standing on the terraces paying, and we say terraces, not the stands, six, seven, eight quid, something like that. And it's very easy, 40 odd years later, to look through rose tinted spectacles and go, well, you know, the air hung with cigarette smoke and quite often weed. And it was a bit ramshackle. It was a bit of a thrill, a bit dangerous. But actually football was in the mud. And we, the fan, were regarded by the authorities with utter suspicion. Well, nowadays we complain about VAR and high ticket prices. I mean, anyone born after 1990 would struggle to believe that football was ever played in the circumstances in which it was played.

1:42Crumbling concrete terraces, corrugated roofs, crushed barriers, running battles in the streets around the ground. Football as a national front recruiting ground, bananas thrown at black players. And you mentioned those three tragedies. Football was a killing ground. We don't need to be shy about saying that. And I mean, just on a personal level, I started watching football properly in the mid 70s. My family ran a pub in North Wales for a while and I'd go to Liverpool and Everton on alternate weekends. And I fell in love with football during that decade on Merseyside. So that's 50 years ago. The only time I've turned my back on football was in the mid 80s when I was at university.

2:21And I couldn't bear it. I couldn't bear the death toll, the violence, the racism, the sense that every game was a risky enterprise. you know, an explosion waiting to happen. And I became sickened by football just for a brief period in the mid-1980s because of all this. So we're talking here about the context to Italia 90, this very transformative World Cup in Italy. But football in the preceding decade was so bad that the Times, the Sunday Times, published a famous editorial. This was just after the Bradford City fire in which 56 people died and 265 people were injured. A wooden stand caught fire and was fully ablaze within four minutes.

3:07The Sunday Times said football was a slum sport played in slum stadiums increasingly watched by slum people who deter decent folk from turning up. A bit classist, but the point was basically right. Football in the 1980s structurally was a disaster zone. And because the grounds were pretty primitive, it's really interesting to look at the attendances back then. So there'd been a boom in attendances after 1966. Not surprisingly, England had won the World Cup, remaining above 14 million till 73-74. England don't qualify for the World Cup, that's interesting, to a low of 7.8 million in 88-89. The end of that season is the Hillsborough disaster.

3:50the average Premier League attendance today is over 40 ,000 so they had declined in the top division to an average of 18 ,500 in the mid 80s that says it all that is people going through the gates to sit in stadiums the main stands might have been fine two main stands the terraces at either end frankly not fit for purpose primitive god help if you're a woman going to football in the 80s if you could find a serviceable loo you were doing well you and I peed against a wall in the 80s as simple as that Wembley I remember doing that speak for yourself yeah but I mean I remember going to a game Walsall v Chelsea in the in the League Cup Mickey Thomas was playing for Chelsea but wasn't in the squad and I went for a wee at halftime and I was standing by the wall against the wall next to Mickey Thomas who was a Chelsea player I mean it was it was primitive doesn't even begin to describe what it was like well one word dangerous it was extremely dangerous every time you went to a game you thought christ i better be careful today i better not i better not make the wrong turn at the wrong time i better not get in the middle of a group of away fans for example you know you were nervous going to football a lot of people found that exhilarating of course there was there was a thrill for young people to some degree but you know pitch invasions street fights and in environments in stadiums that were dangerous to be in as we found so disastrously at Bradford, Hazel and Hillsborough.

5:19And of course the Hillsborough which is the most unimaginable tragedy is a the author the attitude of the authorities and be of course fences not every ground had fences but a lot of them had fences and of course the terrible tragedy of Hillsborough is that people were trying to get out and the police thought they were rioters because that's what the attitude towards football fans on the terraces were. You are here to cause trouble. We're not going to sit here and list all the riots there were. But in 1985, just before the Bradford fire, a cup tie between Lewton and Millwall, there was such a riot and seats thrown at Kenilworth Road that David Evans, who was the Lewton chairman and a Tory MP, he and Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister, wanted to bring in ID cards.

6:03They actually did pass the law, but it was never enacted because the hills were disaster they wanted to bring in an id card you had to show id when you went to a football match i think particularly if you're an away fan no absolutely and it's chilling to think that a year and two months before italian 90 which is presented as this great cleansing opera in italy where the middle class is flooded back to the game and football became safe and respectable again a year before that in the leppings lane stand at hillsborough a total in the end of 97 people lost their lives. 766 people were also injured.

6:41And that was the nadir for English football. It was the nadir for British sport, actually. A colossal tragedy that is still being felt today by the fight for justice. At all levels of society, it was a cover-up, and it's still being fought over today. And yet, you know, a year and two months later, Bobby Robson's England travelled to an Italian 90 and as many people will have it, English football began to feel that it had turned a corner. The other thing is about this time, two other things which I think is really worth noting. One, football wasn't on the television that much. It really wasn't on the television.

7:17That was match of the day and Sunday afternoon. But in terms of live matches, there weren't that many. And the other, but amazing to think today, sport wasn't as obsessive as it is now. It really, I mean, sport was on the back pages. it wasn't in the sort of running orders or the public consciousness, anything like as much as it is today. I think that's fair to say. Oh, completely. I mean, I'm glad you mentioned that because I went down a rabbit hole on TV coverage of football when I was researching this. And for a while, there were only three live games were allowed to be shown on BBC and TV.

7:50In 1983. Per season. Yeah. Per season. Exactly. And in 1983, they expanded it to 10 live games. And the BBC and ITV, who were accused of running a cartel and carving up the rights between them, paid£2.6 million for those 10 live games. Huge pressure began to develop to exploit the TV revenue potential of football. But in the 80s, clubs, because they were run by people who didn't understand what they were sitting on, the money was derisory. And the amount of live coverage, as you said, was virtually non-existent. And the leading clubs weren't in Europe because they'd been banned after Heysel. So from 1985 onwards, for the rest of the decade, they were banned.

8:33So this is the backdrop then. England qualified for the World Cup and the England team, in the 80s, they'd reached the quarterfinals in Mexico. That's all they'd done. They'd stunk the place out at Euro 88. They were after the manager, Bobby Robson. The headlines were pretty nasty. Go in the name of Alago, I remember, after a draw in Saudi Arabia and went up to the World Cup. so England go to Italia 90 under this cloud and the Italian police decide the best thing to do is to put the England group games in Sardinia in the hope that it can contain the fans and we'll pick it up in Sardinia when we come back in a moment

9:24So England are qualified for the World Cup. That's great. And today it's very easy. People would say, well, they always qualify for the World Cup. You can carbon date anybody who says they always qualify for the World Cup because they didn't sit through the 70s or subsequently 1994. It was a tough qualifying group, but they got through in the end with a good draw in Poland. But not only do the Cabernet Neri put England in Sardinia to try and... Basically, they're going to kettle the England fans on an island. There is definitely a worry, a suspicion, whatever, that if the England fans kick off in Sardinia, the government might pull the England team out.

9:57That was not beyond the bounds of possibility. We're banned from Europe. The English disease is everywhere. If you kick off and cause trouble, we might pull the England team out. So England get there under the mark of shame. As you said, Bobby Robson's reputation is at a bit of a low ebb there because of the 1988 European Championship. And it starts very inauspiciously, Mark, because England play the Republic of Ireland and it's a long ball carnival. Jack Charlton's Republic of Ireland. In the rain, wasn't it? Yeah, there's a medieval siege of England's penalty box with high balls, long balls.

10:31And it's like the worst game of football you've ever seen. Well, do you remember the headline? It said something like, no football, please wear British. And the sun is so disgusted by what it's seen that it suggests that the team should come home, basically. Bring them home is a staple of Fleet Street football coverage. It was in those days. So one bad performance and it's bring them home. And it did look pretty bad. People just forgot to notice that England were playing the Republic of Ireland, who developed as very effective. I'm not going to be rude about it, style of play. But in the next game, there is a phenomenal transformation in England's prospects.

11:08In the Netherlands game, which is only a nil-nil draw, but England are much the better side. And more to the point, they switched to a three at the back system with a sweeper, which completely transforms the players and liberates the fluidity and the rhythm of the team. And from then, England don't look back. That's the night that Paul Gascoigne announces himself properly internationally. I remember him doing a Cruyff turn on the byline and everyone going, blimey, what's this? So it's the greatest nil-nil draw you've ever seen because, as you say, there's a liberation of the team and Gazza's appeared.

11:38That was like Rooney against France at Euro 2004. From that moment on, Gaza is turning into the new sensation of the 1990 World Cup. And England are revitalised. They're inspired. They start to think they can go a long way in the tournament. It's strange to think, isn't it? All because of a little tactical change where you play three at the back instead of two. I asked Terry Butch, who was in the end captain, when Brian Robson went home. like everything in life you know the headline was players make Bobby Robson change tactics I said Terry did you make Bobby Robson change tactics and he was like I don't really remember it like that it's a sort of they sort of get to a decision on the training ground between them all we in the media want you know big volte-fast huge turnaround it's never as simple as that well I wrote Bobby Robson's autobiography with him and I asked him about that and he started hopping around the room he couldn't bear the he said I would never allow players to tell me what formation to play I don't know where this idea comes from.

12:38You know, I couldn't possibly allow it. It took me a while to calm him down, actually, after I'd asked him the question. Anyway, I left the room that day thinking, no, it hadn't been a player's. It was portrayed as a player's revolt, a mutiny, wasn't it? And it was nothing of the sort. They tweaked the team, probably consensually. I'm sure the players had a say in it. But anyway, they didn't use it in the next game against Egypt, which was a 1-0 win. They didn't need a sweeper against Egypt. And then it starts to get seriously impressive with the win against Belgium. I think this is the most pivotal match in modern English football history.

13:16The game in Bologna against Belgium. I really do. Well, first of all, Bologna, beautiful, absolutely beautiful spot. And Rimini is nearby, which is a seaside resort. So lots of England fans stayed there. And there was a riot the night before. Lucky Rimini, yeah. There was the Rosencrown pub. It is called the Rosencrown pub. was sort of bashed up and there was a riot and a lot of fans were deported without even being asked anything. They were just chucked on a plane and sent home. Everyone knows it was a bit unfair but it's the English disease abroad. But there was no problem in Bologna itself.

13:44Belgium, a very, very good team. It could have gone either way. John Barnes scores a goal which our friend VAR probably would award today. But just as it's going to penalties, Paul Gascoigne, you know, flicks a free kick into the area and David Platt swivels and scores. I remember this so well. I was just finishing my finals. And chipped in. And falling in. And it's there by David Platt. England have done it in the last minute of extra time.

14:15England are through to the quarterfinals of the World Cup. And Bobby Robson... I mean, the whole country went mad. And that, Stuart Pearce said in a documentary, that game, something happened and they were like, England are in the quarterfinal. He said that word quarter made a big difference. And this is just the truth. They were up against Cameroon and no African team had ever reached the semifinal of a World Cup. And they're thinking, they're not thinking it's a bye, but they're thinking, wow, this is as good a draw as we can get. And I think if England lose on penalties to Belgium, which they could easily have done, I think the next, I don't know, three, four, five years could have been very, very different.

14:56And the nature of that goal as well, the swivel volley by David Platt. who sort of emerged as an overnight sensation, not like Gascoigne, but certainly in a pretty impressive way and influential way. But it's that classic moment in tournaments when the public starts to fall in love with the team. That was the one I agree. Well, Gascoigne's performance against the Netherlands was probably the bigger one. But when Platt scored that volley and put England through to the quarterfinal against Cameroon... Well, you're now two games away from the World Cup final. Well, yeah. That's the point, isn't it?

15:25You're playing in the quarter... You are two games away from the World Cup final. And they're playing well and they're entertaining. Now the Cameroon quarterfinal, as we know, Cameroon 2, England 3, two Lineker penalties, scrappy, messy, tight, stressful. Wow. Took two penalties to get England through to the semifinal. But nevertheless, England are facing the nemesis again in Turin. So memories of the 1966 final, the 1970 quarterfinal in Mexico. This is it. This is Bobby Robson's England with Gazza and Platt and Lineker against the old enemy in Turin. English football is clambering out of this decade, this hole.

16:06And I think one of the reasons, Paul, is this team had so many characters that people almost could identify with. When Gazza cries in the semifinal, everybody wanted to mother him. Terry Butcher and Stuart Pearce. Yeoman Englishman, you could imagine them standing guard over the Queen's coffin, couldn't you, in their bearskin hats. You know, Wadland Barnes, skilful Mavericks, Gary Inica, you know, Tand and everyone's son-in-law. I think they were characters that people could really identify with because in those days they weren't as far away as today's football characters are. No, but I'm going to play devil's advocate here, Mark, because it goes downhill very quickly after Italia 90.

16:40Great summer. Nobody who saw it will ever forget it. It was magical. It was musical. It was romantic. But then two years later, England are awful at the European Championship and then they don't qualify for the 1994 World Cup. But let's just let's just set the scene in Turin because it's a vanished world. The front page of the Sun says, help our boys clout the krauts. That was the mentality. It might have been written in 1914 or 1939. It was a kind of throwback to the to the old enmity between England and Germany. These are two very evenly matched teams. England are on the up. They fancy their chances.

17:18It's a tight, tactical, strategic, suffocating game. We should say in the 100th minute, we're going to extra time now. Paul Gascoigne gets the ball, loses control of it, stretches to regain possession and throws himself into Thomas Berthold, earning himself a yellow card with a scissor kick that rules him out of the final. Lineker points to the bench to say, keep an eye on him. So we've already got the drama of Gazza's tears, even before we get to the penalty shootout. Chris Wardle hits the post, which is why I said the width of the post. On another day, it would go in or come straight back to Gary Lineker.

17:53It doesn't either. No, no. I mean, let's face it, the England story is full of these hard luck tales. But unfortunately, there's a pattern of, they all add up to a pattern of underachievement. But nonetheless, to fast forward, obviously, Stuart Pearce, his penalty is saved in the penalty shootout. from a low drive that strikes the keeper's legs. And then finally, Chris Waddle misses. He blasts the ball high into the darkness, and England are out. How bizarre the whole thing was in many ways. England are given a hero's welcome at Luton Airport. There's 100 ,000 people there. The M1 is clogged. You can't get anywhere near the M1 because people are flooding to Luton Airport to acclaim this beaten English team, these semi-finalists.

18:36there are t-shirts with England's pride restored on them there's a brass band playing land of hope and glory hats and scarves and teddy bears are thrown at the England players poor Gascoigne wears a set of false breasts and is whisked away by the mail on Sunday to the Dunstan Excelsior working men's club where he says he's gagging for a pint English football which is supposed to have gone all hoity-toity and middle class during that tournament is still very much rooted in the old ways. Okay, so when we come back, I think Paul and I might have a disagreement about just what an impact Italia 90 had on English football.

19:29Well, isn't it interesting? Mrs Thatcher who spent the whole of the 80s deriding football, saying it's the, hooliganism is the English disease. I want ID cards. Basically, they can't be trusted. Who's in number 10 within about a week of the end of the World Cup? Smiling and pulling a face. Paul Gascoigne with his arm around Mrs Thatcher. I mean, nothing like politicians to get on board with a sports team, which has done well. 26 million people, half the population watched that semifinal. And of course, because there was no social media, they didn't know what was going on here. The team were absolutely staggered about how many people had come down the M1 and turned up to Luton Airport.

20:03That autumn, English football is readmitted to European football for the first time since the Heisle disaster. And it is in many ways the start of the reintegration of football into society. And then you get the Taylor report, which happened after the Hillsborough disaster, which was commissioned. And the Taylor report said that clubs had to start treating their fan base as customers. You've got to start treating them properly and then they will respond. And they will all see to stadium. And then football starts to become part of cultural life. and you have Nick Hornby and Fever Pitch and you have Baddiel and Skinner and Fantasy Football League.

20:38And although some people think you start to lose some of the raw and certainly some of the walk-up fan and some of the atmosphere, you get arguably a different class of fan and you get obviously a much safer environment. Now, I would argue that comes straight out of Italia 90, that if England hadn't done well at Italia 90, that maybe those things wouldn't have happened. If England had lost on penalties to Belgium, that maybe we wouldn't have had that fork in the road. Well, I would argue that it had very, very little to do with Italian 19 and everything to do with the revolution in the TV industry and the arrival in football of a group of sort of buccaneering entrepreneurs who realised, as you said, that football needed to change and modernise and become, as David Dean called it, part of the entertainment business.

21:25David Dean was inspired by American sport and their model of putting the customer first and giving them good facilities. And these guys were looking at football and saying, this industry is decrepit. It's stuck in the 1950s at best. So, but anyway, one statistic I think dwarfs all other. When you get this breakaway by the top clubs to form the Premier League as a separate legal entity, Sky paid£304 million for the first five years of the English Premier League TV contract. That is colossal. And it's the biggest TV deal in the history of British sport. It's something like six point seven billion now.

22:03But at the time, three hundred and four million pounds. I mean, these chairmen of these these first division clubs had been scrambling around for five, six, seven million pounds, you know, to to fund them for the whole season. So with that, you get an influx of foreign players, you get an influx of stars, you get stadium rebuilding, you get foreign coaches coming in and changing the old English mindset. I mean, I'll just give one example. New stadiums built since the advent of the Premier League. Leicester, Arsenal, Man City, Brighton, West Ham, London Stadium, they moved there. It's not the same thing.

22:38Spurs, look at the new Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, which opened in 2017. Brentford in 2020, Sunderland, Southampton, the Everton's Hill Dickinson Stadium in 2025. So you get this huge influx of TV money, which funds the construction or refurbishment of dozens and dozens of stadiums in Britain. And then we get this huge wave of foreign stars, starting with Schmeichel and Cantona, followed by Zola and Bergkamp. You've got the numbers there. Give us the numbers about how many overseas players at the start of the Premier League. Ah, this will amaze people. But on the opening weekend, of the first Premier League season, there were 13...

23:15So that's August 92? Yeah, the 90... Yes, exactly, in 1992. August 92. Exactly. There were 13 players from outside the British house. 13. One, three, 13 foreign players in the first Premier League season. Ten years later, there were 126. And according to Transfer Market, there are now 390 or 71 % of the total players in Premier League football. in January 2025 Manchester City's Abdukhadeir Kuzanov became the first player from Uzbekistan to play in the Premier League the reason I mentioned it is that that lifted the number of nationalities represented in the Premier League's 33 year history to 126, 126 countries have sent players to the Premier League, so when you add all that well over half the countries in the world have sent a player to play in the Premier League exactly right, yeah and so So it's that tidal wave of TV money which gets bigger and bigger and bigger, which funds all of this and this transformation of the Premier League into the most watched league.

24:21And you think that would have happened even if England had lost on penalties to Belgium in the quarterfinal, in the last 16? I do. I don't think all this money flooded in because people thought it wasn't Italian 90 great fun, but it was. But I think if England had got knocked out by Belgium, it still would have happened because the club game was decrepit decrepit and it was ripe for transformation. You don't think that Italian 90 made people, let's be blunt, particularly the middle classes, you know, there are plenty of middle class people, one speaking now who loved football all his life, whose mother was a little bit perplexed and he loved football as much as he did when he was a little boy.

24:53But you don't think there are a lot of middle class people who went, actually, Italian 90, that's, I get that. I get these characters. I get the excitement. I get the thrill. I get the collegiate sense of what it is. Yeah. Actually, I'd like to go along for this ride. Yeah, I think there was something, there was definitely something in that. I mean, you know, literary journals started writing pieces about Paul Gascoigne and it became football became the subject of dinner party conversation. And it's a little known detail of the Taylor report that he thought one of the answers were for football to transform itself was to get more middle class people in for it to go up market as if, you know, working class people can't be trusted kind of thing.

25:29But anyway, the gentrification of football was was actually an aim of the Taylor report, really. And so, yes, middle class people did come back to the game, but they wouldn't have stayed. They wouldn't have hung around very long if in 1993, 95, 97 and the year 2000, they'd have had to dodge running battles around football grounds and stand on crumbling terraces. Isn't it one of the great ironies that a woman who I think we can say hated football, certain Margaret Thatcher certainly didn't show that she did not hate football with her discussion and her description of football. Isn't it interesting that her economic philosophy and politics of free markets and the market will find its level in many ways was the perfect environment in which to create the Premier League?

26:15Yeah, absolutely. And the people who changed these clubs, they were very much free marketeers. They were Thatcherite in all but name in the sense that they knew how to modernize businesses and use borrowed money and update. So certainly it's fair to say I think that the context of privatization, the big bang in the city and so on, helped create a mindset in football where the Premier League started to see itself as a seriously commercial operation and not a sporting one. But we're really talking about quite a short period of time here from Italia 90 to now is what, 35 years? It sounds a long time, but actually the change in that time.