Thirty years of the Premier League: football’s journey from outlaw pursuit to digital juggernaut

In another timeline, a version of the present where things had turned out differently on the gore-soaked fields of the satellite broadcast wars in the summer of 1990, Britain might by now be three decades into its great, transformative opera boom.

In this version of events, sparked by British Satellite Broadcasting’s decisive victory over the long-forgotten “Sky TV”, the nation has spent the years since in thrall to BSB’s relentless, beautifully packaged operatic programming – to the extent all other human activity now seems subservient to the national obsession with rolling 24-hour bel canto, Super Saturday chamber music, the multimillion-pound conductor transfer roundabout.

There are, of course, problems even here. The obsession with celebrity tenors. Public outrage over singers’ pay. The fear elite opera has lost touch with its grass roots, not to mention the weaponising of Big Opera by petro-states eager to launder their reputations.

But still that juggernaut keeps rolling, the billion-dollar recital deals, the kids in replica capes and gloves in every city centre; albeit with talk now of a breakaway 18th-century classical Super Opera League, sparking questions in parliament, marches from fans, protest flares fired from between the buttock cheeks of the opera ultras.

Except, of course, it didn’t play out like that. Instead BSB, with its Mozart nights and Tosca beanos, allowed Sky to merge it out of existence, a victory mitigated only by the short-lived adoption of the name BSkyB, an act of friendship up there with the bit in the Star Wars prequels where stormtroopers are spotted patrolling the streets whistling like bobbies on the beat, pretending to be nice.

From that point Sky filled the skies. And, of course, it