10 Best Premier League Matches Of The 1990s

The birth of something great...

By Fred Humphries /

It has become one of the most overused cliches that any good game is a "fantastic advert for the Premier League", but during the league's infancy in the 1990s it probably needed some advertising to prove that the new system would work. Sky Sports' coverage of the top tier was revolutionising football, with the new wealth enticing some of the world's best players to ply their trade in England. With this influx of foreign players came new ways of looking at the game, this fresh approach being exactly what English football needed in the post Taylor Report climate. Nowadays it could be argued that football has become a little sterile and over-analysed but during the 90s there was a perfect balance of traditional British grit with smatterings of foreign flair. This created the perfect concoction for some classic encounters full of goals and even more thud and blunder. Legends like Le Tissier, Shearer and Cantona were at their peak while younger talents like Owen, Fowler and Scholes were beginning to demonstrate what the future would hold for the Premier League. With high stakes, top of the table clashes, and relegation epics aplenty, it really was an exceptional time for football in England. Here are the top 10 matches from the opening decade of the Premier League.