Football these days is almost unrecognisable at times from how the game was in the 1980s.
The fundamentals remain the same of course - eleven against eleven - the ultimate aim being to get the round object into the rectangular thing.. Everton annually finding a way to make a mess of their League Cup campaign.
But there have been seismic changes since the decade which arguably more than any other ushered in the all-singing, all-dancing globally marketed product we see today, some of them for the better. Supporters are generally much safer attending matches than they were back then, most weekends there are literally dozens of televised matches from all over the world for armchair fans to enjoy rather than the handful a season audiences had to be grateful for back then, and, from a player’s perspective, their shorts are more generously cut.
