Forty years ago this month, the Pet Shop Boys track West End Girls topped the charts. Manchester United, Liverpool, Everton and Chelsea were locked in a four-way battle for the title. And Arnold Schwarzenegger appeared on Wogan. Terry: “This new film you’ve made, Commando: it’s very violent isn’t it?” Arnie: “Actually, it’s low-key. I only kill around 100 people.”
How do I know this? Because Facebook’s algorithm serves it to me daily. Terrifyingly, it understands me better than I understand myself. A half-forgotten goal, race or innings? That is my sugar-salt-fat magic. An old Top 40 chart or TV listing? My double‑strength nicotine patch.
Inevitably, in the comments, there’s always someone saying things were better back in the day. But were they really? To put such cosy recollections to the test, I rewatched as much sport as possible from this week in 1986. Then I delved into the Guardian’s archives to see what people were saying about the state of sport at the time. What I found often surprised me.
The first thing I learned? There was 16 hours of sport shown on television between 18 and 24 January, 40 years ago – if you count Bullseye, Pot Black, A Question of Sport and Pro-Celebrity Golf, which featured the unlikely pairing of Arnold Palmer and Gary Player with the comedians Mike Read and Eddie Large. Almost none of it was live.
Grandstand had a couple of races from Haydock Park, followed by England’s 21-18 Five Nations victory against Wales. Channel 4 showed indoor athletics from RAF Duxford just before Cheers on Friday night. ITV covered the boxer Terry Marsh in his first European title defence. But that was it.
Just imagine: no live football. Only Saint and Greavsie, League Cup highlights and Match of the Day, which was returning after a four-month blackout of the Football League. That is something I had completely forgotten. When we think about the 1985-86 season, Maradona, the World Cup and Liverpool’s double come to mind: not that we didn’t see half of it.
While Match of the Day from 18 January 1986 starts with Nottingham Forest beating Manchester United in a 3-2 thriller, what is striking about the other matches is how empty the grounds are. Attendances fell to 16.5 million that season, the lowest since records began in 1922, owing to hooliganism and decrepit stadiums. What was that about things not being like they used to be?
A third surprise was that sport was more eclectic than I had imagined. Channel 4 covered 61 sports in the mid‑80s, including Australian rules football, city centre cycling and even polo. Granada experimented with croquet (“Like snooker standing up,” wrote the Guardian’s TV critic Nancy Banks-Smith). Such was the thirst for athletics that ITV signed a £10.5m five-year contract to show up to 17 domestic track‑and‑field meetings a year between 1985 and 1990.
Some things, though, were just as I had remembered. You can watch highlights of England’s Five Nations win against Wales, with Rob Andrew kicking all 21 points, on YouTube. But Frank Keating summed it up pithily on these pages, after noting that Rory Underwood didn’t get a solitary run with ball in hand. “Not that England’s new backroom team seemed to mind,” he wrote. “The kicks went over. And a win is a win.”
The Marsh fight was rugged, brawly, typical Marsh. What struck me most about the athletics at RAF Duxford was the advertisement for Birmingham’s bid for the 1992 Olympics and a young Roger Black. But this was an era when sport did big numbers. Channel 4’s coverage of the Super Bowl got 6.04 million viewers. Athletics from Crystal Palace was watched by 4.85 million. Another 9.3 million saw Boris Becker win Wimbledon and 15.35 million watched England lose against Argentina in the World Cup. There was so little live sport that we gravitated to whatever, whenever.
Yet iIt was still behind soaps such as EastEnders and Coronation Street, which regularly pulled in more than 18 million people each week. ITVs then head of sport, John Bromley, had a theory as to why that might be. “To get really big audiences on television you need women,” he said. “And they don’t watch much sport – except snooker because, I’m told, they find something sexual about the players.”
Even in 1986 there were growing worries about where sport might be heading, especially with the rise of pay-TV in the US. Keating kicked off a series of articles by warning that “what America does today, Britain does tomorrow”. He had been at Wembley at 4am, with his winter overcoat on in July, to watch Frank Bruno fight Tim Witherspoon because of US TV. Was it, he warned, a sign of things to come?
That theme was echoed by Michael Grade, then the BBC’s director of programmes. “The BBC maintains its coverage of showjumping, even now when it is going through a flat period,” he wrote. “We transmit Jack High [bowls] and Ski Sunday as well as snooker and soccer.
“In all, more than 50 British sports get our serious attention. If in future sport is to be bought and sold to the highest bidder … then that will ultimately beggar sport itself and impoverish the viewing choices of the British public.”
While some of Grade’s vision has come to pass, and I certainly wish the BBC showed more Olympic sports outside the Games, consumers’ choices certainly are broader than ever. This weekend I was able to watch an extraordinary Africa Cup of Nations final, two thrilling NFL playoff games, some football and tennis and even captured Matej Svancer losing a ski while spinning 180 degrees in the air before somehow landing on one leg. If I had the time I could have seen women’s cyclocross and Latin American amateur golf.
Sure, watching sport in 2026 isn’t perfect. Football is too dominant, leaving other sports struggling for funds and eyeballs. Streaming subscriptions and ticket prices keep going up. Even so, there is a good argument to suggest that the golden age for sports coverage was not 30, 40 or 50 years ago. It is now.
-
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.