Premier League at 25: 1997-2002 - BBC News
Arsene who?
Five years on from its initiation, the Premier League finally had a rivalry to define it. From 1992 to 1997, Manchester United had won their four championships by a total of 29 points. The only team to break their grip, Blackburn Rovers, finished the following season seventh. Now, with Arsene Wenger established at Highbury and talented compatriots - such as Patrick Vieira, Nicolas Anelka and Emmanuel Petit - flooding in with him, Alex Ferguson no longer had it all his own way. United would lose the title to Arsenal by a point in 1998 and win it back by the same margin in 1999. The two clubs would finish in the top two places in four successive years. Both men spent significant amounts of money in the transfer market, although it would be the relative bargains that sealed their greatest triumphs: Anelka, bought for £500,000 and sold for £22m, scoring the goal that sealed the 1998 Double, Arsenal's first in 27 years; Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, picked up for £1.5m, turning in the late, late goal that won United the 1999 Champions League final and an unprecedented Treble. There were rivalries within the rivalry - not least Roy Keane v Vieira - but the model of the two managers was not dissimilar: a bedrock of British talent, a dominant goalkeeper, a midfield that mixed grace with menace and the sort of pace up front that no-one else could match.

The enforcers - clashes between Keane (left) and Vieira (right) epitomised the fierce rivalry between Manchester United and Arsenal

If Ferguson could be considered fortunate to have David Beckham, Paul Scholes, Nicky Butt and the Neville brothers all maturing together, and Wenger was lucky to inherit a defence built around Tony Adams, Steve Bould, Lee Dixon and Nigel Winterburn, both men maximised the gifts at their disposal. And neither was quite as blessed as Petit, who in the space of two months won the Double with Arsenal, scored the final goal as France won the World Cup on home soil and then bagged £17,000 on a fruit machine in a Monte Carlo hotel. He gave the last of those prizes to charity. Not all were so fortuitous. Tottenham's attempt to ape their rivals with a foreign maverick manager of their own began with Christian Gross waving a Travelcard and ended with him waving goodbye nine ugly months later. The gap between haves and have-lesses was becoming starker with every season; all three of the promoted teams in 1997 were relegated a year later. Money was changing the game and changing players' outlooks. Somewhere in the mid-1990s, footballers stopped collecting the greatest hits of Phil Collins and Rod Stewart, and started getting into the sort of music most men of their age liked. While some stayed traditional (David Unsworth and his love of John Secada), you could go to the house of David James and be shown his Technics decks, even if he seldom used them. Nottingham Forest striker Paul McGregor formed a Britpop band called Merc. Michael Duberry would eulogise about the beats and voice of R&B producer Keith Sweat. Early in the Premier League's lifespan, Nottingham Forest midfielder Ian Woan had spent his summer break with his wife in her native USA. When two team-mates had joined them on the beach in old-fashioned 1980s-style swimming trunks, the Americans wearing board shorts and Bermudas had looked on in astonishment. By the late 1990s, footballers had gone from such fashion faux-pas to the catwalks. Dean Holdsworth modelled for Topman, his Wimbledon team-mate Stewart Castledine for DKNY, even if Chris Perry and Peter Fear did not get the call. Robbie Savage got a tattoo of the Armani logo. He has now had it removed. Glamour came to unlikely places. Bolton, who had started the decade at a ground old enough to have featured in a Lowry painting and low-key enough to have a supermarket behind one of the goals, saw global superstars such as Jay-Jay Okocha, Ivan Campo and Youri Djorkaeff strutting around their new 29,000 all-seater Reebok Stadium. Not all overseas signings were such a success. While the big wages and high hopes of Premier League owners had already seen Andrea Silenzi and Tomas Brolin stink out Forest and Leeds respectively, the flops kept coming as the money piled up.

Before Zola, Di Canio and Vialli there was Andrea Silenzi - the first Italian to play in the Premier League

Spurs chairman Alan Sugar called them "Carlos Kickaballs". Blackburn fans had other names for Corrado Grabbi, Aston Villa supporters choice words for Bosko Balaban. Some big names arrived and then never appeared, defender Winston Bogarde emblematic of a new sort of ambition: earning as much as you could while training and playing only for the reserves. Big names began to fall. Manchester City dropped to the third tier, Forest to the second. Sheffield Wednesday sank, yet to return, and Leeds - Peter Ridsdale's rented goldfish and all - were beginning a precipitous decline that would take them from the semi-finals of the Champions League towards insolvency. The audience was changing too, moving upmarket, getting older, becoming more corporate. Keane talked darkly of the prawn sandwich brigade. Players’ lifestyles moved with the times: the end of the old Tuesday Club at Arsenal, when the team would turn up for training in suits, the quicker to be out on the town later that day and filling their boots with beer; the disgust on Paolo di Canio’s face when the West Ham coach stopped off at a fish and chip shop on the way back south from an evening kick-off. The more significant move at Old Trafford came in 2002, when Ferguson changed his mind about retirement and signed on for more. If it was bad news for some of his players, it was worse yet for the club's rivals. Ferguson was only just getting started.