Since the media baron brought the beautiful game to the masses in the 90s, the sport has taken over the media and society – a process queasily celebrated in this BBC docuseries
“Now they analyse everything in football,” laments Eric Cantona, genial, bearded and altogether more mellow than he was in his karate-kicking, sardine-citing 1990s Old Trafford pomp. “All I know is I can express myself. I don’t want to know more. It’s like in love – I don’t want to know why I love my wife.”
These wise words from the Manchester United talisman come during the first episode of Fever Pitch! The Rise of the Premier League (BBC Two), a new series devoted to precisely what he was indicting. As Cantona’s compatriot and fellow philosopher Marc Perelman argued in Barbaric Sport: A Global Plague, today the media are “all united to make sport inescapable, so that everyday conversation is bloated with invasive logorrhoeic blather”.
