The European Championships of 1980 and 2000 were only 20 years apart. They also belonged, both literally and figuratively, to different millennia. Euro 80 was a violent mess of negativity, apathy and hooliganism, Euro 2000 a joyous, sunkissed celebration of 21st-century football.
That jarring contrast was the spark for the latest series of Nessun Dorma: an odyssey through the history of football in the 1980s and 1990s. Our aim is to highlight, via a series of subterranean dives into each football season, how it went from being a “a slum sport played in slum stadiums and increasingly watched by slum people” – as a Sunday Times editorial called it in 1985 – to a multi-gazillion pound industry.
