Nessun Dorma podcast: a 1980s and 1990s football odyssey
The show about retro football is back with a Homeric series on how the sport evolved at the end of the 20th century
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.
