When the Seagulls Follow the Trawler : Football in the 90s

The 1990s saw English football go mainstream. When the Seagulls Follow the Trawler looks back at the decade in which the game moved out of the darkness and into the light. An era which saw the birth of the Premier League, Eric Cantona's arrival, Liverpool's 'Spice Boys', Euro 96, the Bosman rule, and Arsene Wenger's Arsenal Revolution.

English football changed in the 1990s. For better, for worse - but mainly for better. The shirts and shorts got baggier and brighter. Exotic-named players were enticed from overseas. New stadiums were built in the wake of the Taylor Report. The Premier League emerged and England hosted its first international tournament since 1966. The era of ''New Labour'' and ''Cool Britannia'', it was also the decade English football went mainstream. When the Seagulls Follow the Trawler author Tom Whitworth travelled to English football''s hotbeds - the cities of London, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle - to meet the people who lived through an era of change: the players and the managers, the owners and the fans. He looks back at key moments, the teams, the title races, the twists and turns, the characters and the rivalries. All from a decade when English football began to shrug off its bad-lad image - at least off the pitch - and move out of the darkness and into the light.