Ever since the principle of professionalism first gained official acceptance in English football in the late nineteenth century, the remark that football is as much a business as it is a sport has been something of a clichè. But for the first six decades of the twentieth century football was a business run on commercial principles that seem worlds apart from those that currently prevail among the sport's highest echelons in the Premier League. It is either reassuring or worrying, depending on one's point of view, that at the start of the twenty-first century, one can still find evidence in the lower reaches of the Football League that older practices and attitudes are not yet totally extinct.

With hindsight, the last four decades of the twentieth century can be seen as something of a continuum, during which the trend towards what, for want of a better word we shall call the ‘commercialisation’ of professional football, was always apparent, even though the process gained and lost momentum at different times within this period. Broadly speaking, the 1960s was a decade of fast transformation, as football's economic structure adapted to changes such as the abolition of the maximum wage and the introduction of freedom-of-contract. During the 1970s and early 1980s the pace of change slowed as the sport's policy agenda became mainly defensive, dominated by issues such as the twin demons of hooliganism and declining spectator interest.