BBC announces Story Films series commission on the history of the Premier League

The Premiership: A Whole New Ball Game (w/t)

The Premiership: A Whole New Ball Game (w/t) is a new 4×60′ documentary series, charting the creation and evolution of the Premier League from 1992 to 2000.

It will tell a definitive insiders’ story of how successive groups of business brains, players, agents and journalists utterly transformed our 100 year old national game and created an off-and-on pitch soap opera that continues to enthral an audience of nearly five billion people around the world for 38 weeks a year.

Focussing on individual stories told first-hand by a cast of famous and less-familiar faces, the series will explore the extraordinary experience of those central to the rapid evolution of the most high profile and lucrative sporting competition the world has ever seen – many of them young men from ordinary homes who overnight became millionaires and cultural icons amid the shifting attitudes and social change of 1990s Britain.

Built at its outset on a high stakes business decision, wildly increasing sums of money have continued to define success and failure in the Premier League. This series will unpick the relationship between the business and the ballgame, the back room machinations and the iconic match day moments, to tell a definitive history of the opening decade of the ‘greatest show on earth’.

The Premiership: A Whole New Ball Game (w/t), a 4×60’ for BBC Two, was commissioned by Patrick Holland, Controller, BBC Two and Clare Sillery, Head of Commissioning, Documentaries, History and Religion. It is made by Story Films in association with Studio 99. The Executive Producers are David Nath and Peter Beard. The Commissioning Editor is Hamish Fergusson.

BBC press release here