Premier League’s latest move is a cause for celebration – but it doesn’t benefit fans | OneFootball

The Premier League has released 20-minute highlights of every match in the competition’s history on their website.

On the surface, it’s a rare and uncomplicated reason to celebrate. No need to take out a third mortgage for a bag of Mini Eggs this Easter, when you can feast on football from the Good Old Days.

Manchester United fans can rewind the clock back to 1999 and relive the treble-winning season.

While Chelsea supporters may shed a tear watching prime Mourinho stalk the touchline, as performative as Liam Rosenior but without the Linkedin-addled nonsense.

With a free Premier League account, you can be transported back to a world of Maine Road, Upton Park, The Dell, Highfield Road and White Hart Lane.

A world where shots were fired with the accuracy of a Somme howitzer, pitches doubled up as urban beaches and advertising hoardings were less obstrusive. Marvellous, isn’t it?

But scratch below the surface and this apparently benevolent move has ulterior motives, both for the Premier League and for us.

For the organisation, this feels like another step towards establishing a stand-alone Premier League streaming service.

Already being trialled in Singapore next season, the Premier League is eager to see how this Netflix-style platform can be “replicated all around the world”.

It could be existential for Sky Sports, a channel whose relationship with the Premier League is effectively a one-sided blood pact.

While we shouldn’t draw the curtains and post black tiles on Instagram should Sky Sports fold, it’s unlikely any benefits from the new platform will be weighted more towards users than the company itself.

There are also the usual data harvesting concerns, with the organisation tracking user habits for personalised content and advertising.

But there’s something more existential going on, one that’s tied up with the grindingly uncertain state of the wider world.

In a 2025 interview, documentarian Adam Curtis noted how people retreated into themselves once they realised nobody in a position of power had their best interests at heart.

“I get the sense now that we live in a society where lots of people have retreated into their own heads,” Curtis said.

Politicians have stopped being the people’s representatives against Big Business, but representing those business interests to the people.

As a result, most of us feel powerless to effect any change. Retreating into the past and wallowing in nostalgia, where the outcomes are predictable, is an understandable coping mechanism to deal with this.

And it’s surely a belief encouraged by organisations like the Premier League, who seem unconcerned that most of its member clubs are hiking ticket prices and actively preventing great sections of society from attending matches and creating new memories.

Explaining his series Shifty, which explores Britain at the end of the 20th Century, Curtis suggested:

Most football supporters have a sense that the modern game is f*cked, but those in England have no sense of collective action. German fans do this a lot better than us and have affected change on issues such as club ownership and kick-off times.

Instead, we succumb to the easy option and retreat into nostalgia. That’s much easier than coming together to create an authentic vision for football’s future.

It’s a phenomenon that’s entirely modern, too. It’s hard to imagine 30-year-olds in 2001 not only constantly pining for the 1980s, but endlessly replaying the past back to themselves on demand.

We don’t have the solution either and that’s the point. We’re all as fear-ridden as each other, looking back to an idealised past for solutions to a broken present.

By all means, enjoy the Premier League’s archive. It’s a brilliant resource, in small doses. Just don’t believe it’s there for your benefit.