The modern era of football

Several things happened across the 1990s that, together, fundamentally changed football. The European Cup introduced a group stage, adopted the Champions League name and expanded across the following decade. Satellite television began to fund top-flight football at a much higher level. The Bosman ruling changed how players moved between clubs. National leagues opened up to international players. The Women's World Cup was introduced. Each of these shifts on its own was significant; together, they reshaped the sport.

The modern era is also when football's global commercial structure expanded sharply. By the start of the twenty-first century, football was the leading sport in most parts of the world, and the major European leagues were watched in every continent. The modern game remains recognisably connected to the football of the 1970s, but its scale and its commercial structure are very different.

The globalisation of football has several strands. Players move more regularly between countries and continents, subject to contracts, transfer rules and work-permit systems. Clubs sign players from every confederation. Broadcasters sell match rights in every region. Major leagues run pre-season tours abroad, and major clubs maintain academies and partnerships overseas. International ownership of clubs has become well established in the leading leagues.

The result is a single connected market for football talent, attention and money. Local football in any one country is shaped by what happens in the rest of the world, and the leading clubs and competitions sit on top of a global pyramid rather than only a national one.

Before the Bosman ruling, players were often unable to move between clubs at the end of their contracts without a transfer fee being paid. The European Court of Justice ruled in 1995, in a case brought by the Belgian player Jean-Marc Bosman, that this restriction breached European Union free-movement law. The effect was that players could move freely once their contracts ended.

The ruling also struck down quotas on European Union nationals in club squads. From 1995 onwards, players from any EU country could sign for any club in another EU country without being treated as foreign players. The combination of these two changes — free movement at contract end and the removal of EU quotas — opened up player movement to an extent that had not been possible before, and the leading European leagues became much more international as a result.

The European Cup began in 1955 as a knockout competition for national champions. A group stage was introduced before the Champions League name was fully adopted in the early 1990s, and the competition then expanded across the following decade to include more clubs from the strongest leagues. The new branding also pushed the competition's commercial side much harder, helping it grow into one of the world's most prominent club competitions.

The Champions League's growth shaped the wider European game. National leagues built their seasons around qualifying for it. Wages and transfer values in the leagues with the most Champions League places rose ahead of those that did not. The competition itself produced many widely discussed matches of the modern era, including a number of finals that are regular reference points in football history.

When the English Premier League was set up in 1992, the founding clubs broke from the existing Football League to negotiate their own television deal. Similar deals were signed in other leading European leagues across the same decade. From that point on, broadcasting revenue became one of the central sources of income for many top-flight clubs.

The growth in broadcasting revenue paid for higher wages, larger squads, bigger transfer fees and new infrastructure. It also widened the gap between the leading leagues and the rest. Sponsorship, club-owned media and direct-to-consumer streaming have added further layers to football's commercial structure, with leading clubs operating as major entertainment businesses rather than traditional local sports teams.

The FIFA Women's World Cup was first held in 1991 and has expanded several times since. UEFA's women's European Championship, the women's competitions in the other confederations, the UEFA Women's Champions League and the leading domestic women's leagues — including the WSL in England, the NWSL in the United States, the Liga F in Spain and the Frauen-Bundesliga in Germany — all developed across the same period.

Professional contracts in the women's game became normal across the leading leagues during the 2010s. Crowds, broadcasting deals and prize money have grown from a much smaller base. The women's game has strengthened its structure and visibility, although it remains younger than the men's professional game by about a hundred years, and has its own history shaped in part by the long periods when it was held back by national associations.

Goal-line technology was the first major piece of in-game technology allowed into the Laws, used to confirm whether the ball has crossed the line. Video assistant referees (VAR) followed and are used in many major competitions to review certain decisions, including goals, penalties, red cards and cases of mistaken identity. Semi-automated offside technology has been used at the World Cup and in some leagues to speed up offside decisions.

Outside refereeing, data analysis has become a major part of how teams scout, train and prepare for matches. GPS tracking, video analysis and event-level match data are standard at professional level. Broadcasting has been changed in parallel, with on-screen graphics, replay analysis and statistics built into match coverage in a way that did not exist a generation ago.