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On 16 January 1984 the channel was renamed Sky Channel.

For the entirety of its early life, the channel continued to be a loss-making enterprise, losing £10 million in 1987. However, in contrast to the station's founders, Murdoch had pockets deep enough to sustain the operation.

Murdoch bid for the satellite broadcasting license in 1986 but lost out to BSB who announced plans to begin broadcasting in mid-1989 with three channels on satellite frequencies legally allotted to the UK by international agreement. Murdoch attempted to join the BSB consortium, but was rejected which spurred him on to set up his own satellite service.

On 8 June 1988, Murdoch announced at a press conference his plans to expand Sky's service to four channels, thus creating the Sky Television network.

Sky TV began broadcasting four channels of programming on 5 February 1989. Start-up costs reached £122 million; losses for its first year of operations were £95 million

BSB merger

Sky's earlier launch and leasing of transponders on the Astra satellite network allowed it to merge with its rival BSB.

In 1990 both companies were beginning to struggle with the burden of massive losses and in November 1990 there was a 50:50 financial merger, with a management takeover by Sky

The new company was called British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB) but marketed as Sky.

The early years of the merged BSkyB saw a haemorrhage of cash from News Corporation funds. At this stage of the company's life it was losing millions of pounds a week.

By September 1991, the weekly losses had been reduced to £1.5M a week.

In the Autumn of 1991, talks were held for the broadcast rights for Premier League for a five-year period, from the 1992 season. BskyB paying £304m for the Premier League rights, with give them a monopoly of all live matches, up to 60 per year from the 1992 season

Murdoch has described sport as a "battering ram" for pay-television, providing a strong customer base

A few weeks after the deal, ITV went to the High court to get an injunction as it believe their details were leaked before the decision was taken.

ITV also asked the Office of Fair Trading to also investigate since it believed Rupert Murdoch's media empire via the newspapers had influence the deal. A few days later neither action took effect, ITV believed BSkyB was telephoned and informed of its £262m bid, and Premier League advised BSkyB to increase its counter bid.

By March 1992, BSkyB posted its first operating profits, of £100,000 per week, with £3.8 million weekly from subscriptions and £1 million from advertising, but continued to be burdened with £1.28 billion of debt. James Capel forecast BSkyB would still be indebted in 2000.

The 1989–90 season was Manchester United's 87th season in the Football League.

The season brought their lowest league finish since their relegation from the First Division 15 years earlier, as they finished 13th in the league, and by Christmas there were continued calls from fans for Alex Ferguson to be sacked as manager.


1987/88


9/7/87 Viv Anderson £0.25m from Arsenal
30/7/87 Brian McClair £0.85m from Celtic
17/12/87 Steve Bruce £0.825m from Norwich City
3/5/88 Paul Dalton £0.035m from Brandon United

1988/89

01/6/88 Jim Leighton £0.75m from Aberdeen
10/6/88 Lee Sharpe £0.185m from Torquay United
20/7/88 Mark Hughes £1.8m from Barcelona
28/10/88 Mal Donaghy £0.65m from Luton Town
11/11/88 Ralph Milne £0.175m from Bristol City
30/11/88 Jules Maiorana £0.03m from Histon

1989/90

Spent:
01/7/89 Mike Phelan £0.75m from Norwich City
24/7/89 Neil Webb £1.5m from Nottingham Forest
24/8/89 Brian Carey £0.1m from Cork City
29/8/89 Gary Pallister £2.3m from Middlesbrough
14/9/89 Paul Ince £1m from West Ham United
18/9/89 Danny Wallace £1.2m from Southampton
26/9/89 Andy Rammell £0.04m from Atherton United

1990/91


1/6/90 Neil Whitworth £0.15m from Wigan Athletic
20/6/90 Denis Irwin £0.625m from Oldham
6/6/90 Les Sealey £0 from Luton Town
26/3/91 Andrei Kanchelskis £1.42m from Shakhtar Donetsk

1991/92


8/8/91 Paul Parker £2m from Queens Park Rangers
12/8/91 Peter Schmeichel £0.53 from Brondby

1992/93


1/8/92 Patrick McGibbon £0.1m from Portadown
7/8/92 Dion Dublin £1m from Cambridge United
27/11/92 Eric Cantona £1.2m from Leeds United
6/1/93 Les Sealey £0 from Aston Villa

The 1992–93 FA Premier League was the first season of the Premier League, the top division of English football. The season began on 15 August 1992 and ended on 11 May 1993. The league was made up of the 22 clubs that broke away from The Football League at the end of the 1991–92 season. The new league was backed up by a five-year, £305 million deal with BSkyB to televise Premier League matches.

Champions Manchester United.

The UEFA Champions League, known simply as the Champions League, is an annual continental club football competition organised by the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) since 1992. It replaced the European Champion Clubs' Cup, or simply European Cup, which had run since 1955, adding a group stage to the competition and allowing multiple entrants from certain countries

etc.

Great post....

TheBlueCatsWhiskers wrote:Great post....

Really?

I'm not really sure what this is trying to get at to be honest.

Stuck with it til then end as it seemed to be building to something. Never got there to me.

Pretty Boy Lee wrote:Stuck with it til then end as it seemed to be building to something. Never got there to me.

Agree. Bit like that Elbow song that was never off the radio.

Wow Ted thanks , great post enjoy it . So i have a question regarding SKY and i will ask here.At my regional cable sports channels ( which are all along the way were the last couple of matches Liverpool fans ) . Direct quote from Sportklub Croatia on game Cristal Palace Liverpool " 3 0 for Liverpool , great ! Liverpool can try now can reach goal difference but City has two games , so hopefully Villa and West Ham will do something " !Not only you suffer with Sky . But now when the game is finished I download whole game from Sky and I can understand that the Croatian sports channel one commentator to can cope with emotion to cheer for Liverpool( but it piss me of so much that i left and sadly did not see comeback ), but what on Sky television i see in just few games is a parody of the channel .It's almost like Monty Python,like compared to a say in the era of the Soviet Union that SKY is some Russian TV and like Liverpool is CSKA ( who was at this club Army ) United is like Spartak Moscow ( who was the Communist Party of the club at that time ) and we Siberian club funded secretly from USA . So i have a question . What is the reason and backgrounds that are so obvious intolerance to Manchester City , how long it takes or where and when it started and how can the British Channel commentator who has too obviously hate City?! Is it just money because there is a lot clubs here spending or what is it. It's not just Tyler like i image u talk here and thinking yea they overreacting a bit, it's a politic of station , why ?

I remember the horrible white 'squarials' for BSB!

I pressume the intention is to highlight how much of a leap Manure made in line with the conception of the PL and BskyB's huge sponsorship deal - they needed a flagship team perhaps and the scummers had already floated?

"The club went public in 1990 and was the subject of takeover bids from property trader Michael Knighton and Rupert Murdoch's BSkyB corporation before Malcolm Glazer's stake was announced in September 2003."

Socrates wrote:

Pretty Boy Lee wrote:Stuck with it til then end as it seemed to be building to something. Never got there to me.

Agree. Bit like that Elbow song that was never off the radio.

I didn't think you all needed the rest spelling out for you seeing as we have mentioned it all on here, over & over, for years.

All I'm doing is showing how the whole thing started ie a business borrowing money & making losses, then buying football under unusual circumstances, then making money from it. Silmultaneously, the Champions League arrived.

Other businesses, like Man Utd, clearly knew what was coming & spent fortunes to get in on it.

Now the clubs who benefitted from Sky running at huge losses, to generate income to fund their passage into the Champions League, are complaining that us running at a loss (& debt free) is cheating.

I didn't really think I needed to mention it.

Cit.revenge wrote:Wow Ted thanks , great post enjoy it . So i have a question regarding SKY and i will ask here.At my regional cable sports channels ( which are all along the way were the last couple of matches Liverpool fans ) . Direct quote from Sportklub Croatia on game Cristal Palace Liverpool " 3 0 for Liverpool , great ! Liverpool can try now can reach goal difference but City has two games , so hopefully Villa and West Ham will do something " !Not only you suffer with Sky . But now when the game is finished I download whole game from Sky and I can understand that the Croatian sports channel one commentator to can cope with emotion to cheer for Liverpool( but it piss me of so much that i left and sadly did not see comeback ), but what on Sky television i see in just few games is a parody of the channel .It's almost like Monty Python,like compared to a say in the era of the Soviet Union that SKY is some Russian TV and like Liverpool is CSKA ( who was at this club Army ) United is like Spartak Moscow ( who was the Communist Party of the club at that time ) and we Siberian club funded secretly from USA . So i have a question . What is the reason and backgrounds that are so obvious intolerance to Manchester City , how long it takes or where and when it started and how can the British Channel commentator who has too obviously hate City?! Is it just money because there is a lot clubs here spending or what is it. It's not just Tyler like i image u talk here and thinking yea they overreacting a bit, it's a politic of station , why ?

Utd, Liverpool & London teams have dominated the media for many many years, so it has always been around. In the case of Sky, they have a long standing relationship with these clubs.

Utd, Liverpool, Arsenal, Everton & Spurs, were the teams who basically created the environment for Sky to buy English football. They pressurised the league with threats that they would break away & form their own league.

Sky were losing money & saw a way to sell satellite tv to millions of people. (Coincidentally , Alan Sugar, chairman of Spurs, owned Amstrad, a leading manufacturer of satellite dishes).

Spurs were actually the club who wanted Sky, the other 4 favoured the other bid which had promised to show their clubs on tv more often. But they had pressed for this deal , so they were basically happy whoever won, so long as they got loads of money.

At the same time, the Champions League arrived, & the same clubs had negotiated with UEFA for that.

They saw a chance, whilst they were in a position of power, to get into the Champs League regularly, make shitloads of money & leave the rest of the league behind. Sky were like a partner helping them do it & at the same time, promoting/advertising them around the world.

Utd worked it very well, as did Arsenal for a while. Liverpool (apart from one CL title), Spurs & Everton have made a right fucking mess of it.

Chelsea, & now City, have pissed on their parade. Chelsea got away with it, but we are one club too many, we threaten the long term plan of Arse & Liverpool in particular, but now Utd as well, & they hate us for it. They have lots of mates in the media, especially Sky.

Ah well I was about 4 when all this was happening and I didn't realise that those amounts (that seem rather modest compared to what we're used to these days) were considered excessive.

twosips wrote:Ah well I was about 4 when all this was happening and I didn't realise that those amounts (that seem rather modest compared to what we're used to these days) were considered excessive.

Signing Phelan, Webb, Pallister, Ince & Wallace etc for example was the start of a 'big' team basically dredging the rest of the league for talent. There were few 'cheap' overseas options to compete. If you wanted the best, it was going to be a British/Irish player, playing here or Scotland.

In those days, lower teams still had one or two top players staying there for a decent period of time. Utd began the destruction of that, where every player who appeared was just a phone call away from signing for one of the 'big' clubs.

Imagine that, in the league now, the only players available were British & Irish ? Imagine if one side went out & bought five of the most sought after, in different positions ? How much would it cost ?

We don't even have enough 'home grown' players now to make a comparison, but for example, if Suarez & Hazard were both English & we signed them plus a young John Terry plus Lampard & Scholes, in the same transfer window. It's that kind of level.

Even Hughes, he was bought back from playing at Bayern Munich & Barca!

They already had the England captain.

On the funny side of course, they then turned up at Maine rd v a City side made from kids & journeymen & lost 5-1. But as soon as Sky arrived, their business people pushed them on to another level & we didn't beat them again til Keegan.

Ted Hughes wrote:
I didn't think you all needed the rest spelling out for you seeing as we have mentioned it all on here, over & over, for years.

All I'm doing is showing how the whole thing started ie a business borrowing money & making losses, then buying football under unusual circumstances, then making money from it. Silmultaneously, the Champions League arrived.

Other businesses, like Man Utd, clearly knew what was coming & spent fortunes to get in on it.

Now the clubs who benefitted from Sky running at huge losses, to generate income to fund their passage into the Champions League, are complaining that us running at a loss (& debt free) is cheating.

I didn't really think I needed to mention it.

It seemed an interesting and worthy comparison to me. Speculate to accumulate. We have done similar but without the whiff of iffy deals

Have a look around 1527 & shorrtly after (note the City bit too & see why it scares them all).

[youtube]TzkRGvL0VNY[/youtube]

That's fantastic. We're very fucking lucky to have someone like him at our club. The growth is astonishing.

Ted Hughes wrote:

Cit.revenge wrote:Wow Ted thanks , great post enjoy it . So i have a question regarding SKY and i will ask here.At my regional cable sports channels ( which are all along the way were the last couple of matches Liverpool fans ) . Direct quote from Sportklub Croatia on game Cristal Palace Liverpool " 3 0 for Liverpool , great ! Liverpool can try now can reach goal difference but City has two games , so hopefully Villa and West Ham will do something " !Not only you suffer with Sky . But now when the game is finished I download whole game from Sky and I can understand that the Croatian sports channel one commentator to can cope with emotion to cheer for Liverpool( but it piss me of so much that i left and sadly did not see comeback ), but what on Sky television i see in just few games is a parody of the channel .It's almost like Monty Python,like compared to a say in the era of the Soviet Union that SKY is some Russian TV and like Liverpool is CSKA ( who was at this club Army ) United is like Spartak Moscow ( who was the Communist Party of the club at that time ) and we Siberian club funded secretly from USA . So i have a question . What is the reason and backgrounds that are so obvious intolerance to Manchester City , how long it takes or where and when it started and how can the British Channel commentator who has too obviously hate City?! Is it just money because there is a lot clubs here spending or what is it. It's not just Tyler like i image u talk here and thinking yea they overreacting a bit, it's a politic of station , why ?

Utd, Liverpool & London teams have dominated the media for many many years, so it has always been around. In the case of Sky, they have a long standing relationship with these clubs.

Utd, Liverpool, Arsenal, Everton & Spurs, were the teams who basically created the environment for Sky to buy English football. They pressurised the league with threats that they would break away & form their own league.

Sky were losing money & saw a way to sell satellite tv to millions of people. (Coincidentally , Alan Sugar, chairman of Spurs, owned Amstrad, a leading manufacturer of satellite dishes).

Spurs were actually the club who wanted Sky, the other 4 favoured the other bid which had promised to show their clubs on tv more often. But they had pressed for this deal , so they were basically happy whoever won, so long as they got loads of money.

At the same time, the Champions League arrived, & the same clubs had negotiated with UEFA for that.

They saw a chance, whilst they were in a position of power, to get into the Champs League regularly, make shitloads of money & leave the rest of the league behind. Sky were like a partner helping them do it & at the same time, promoting/advertising them around the world.

Utd worked it very well, as did Arsenal for a while. Liverpool (apart from one CL title), Spurs & Everton have made a right fucking mess of it.

Chelsea, & now City, have pissed on their parade. Chelsea got away with it, but we are one club too many, we threaten the long term plan of Arse & Liverpool in particular, but now Utd as well, & they hate us for it. They have lots of mates in the media, especially Sky.

Thanks Ted , that make it very clear. That means we should be forever somewhere down and other clubs and we are messing their plans now , money ect.But what amazed me is Tyler , how can that be ,1 0 to city ugh .So there is fear if City succeed that some other invenstor buy Aston Vila or Wigan ,Newcastle and then CL spots are not secure anymore.I just read how much rags drop in earnings this year.

I've been watching this video now for half an hour and its so good. The vision for the club is wonderful. The bit where Soriano talks about the footballing philosophy is incredibly insightful.