Sheffield Wednesday struck gold with Coventry City transfer | OneFootball

The 1990s were heady time for Sheffield Wednesday, and their captain for the second half of the decade would become an understated club legend.

Throughout the second half of the 1990s, Sheffield Wednesday were captained by a versatile defender and midfielder who would make 250 appearances for the club.

The 1990s were different times for Sheffield Wednesday. After a period of decline which lasted a decade and a half and which saw them drop to the third tier of the game, they were revived throughout the first half of the 1980s, and by the end of that decade they were regulars back in the First Division of the Football League.

Relegation in 1990 turned out to be a brief blip, with promotion straight back the following season accompanied by a shock League Cup win against Manchester United, and by the time the Premier League came into being in 1992, Wednesday were one of its founding members, having just finished third behind Leeds United and Manchester United.

By the middle of the decade, then, Wednesday were a well-established Premier League team, and by the end of the 1993-94 season they'd finished the first two seasons of football's "whole new ball game" by finishing in 7th place in the table. And that summer, the arrival of a versatile defender and midfielder would hand the club a captain who would serve them well throughout the second half of the 1990s.

Peter Atherton was already a well-established Premier League player by the time he arrived at Hillsborough

Action Images

There was nothing especially unusual about Sheffield Wednesday's capture of Peter Atherton in the summer of 1995. The defender and occasional defensive midfielder was a solid signing, an established Premier League player who, had he been born a decade later, would probably have been considered a prime "Barclaysman."

Atherton started his senior professional career with his hometown team Wigan Athletic in 1988, and caught the eye over the next three years with almost 150 appearances for the club. In 1991 he was sold to Coventry City, and became a regular in their first team as the First Division transitioned into the Premier League.

Atherton was the definition of a 'stalwart' player for Wednesday throughout the second half of the 1990s

Action Images

With three years of top-flight experience already under his belt, Peter Atherton was Sheffield Wednesday's first signing of the summer, for £800,000 as a replacement for the departing Roland Nilsson, and he was followed by the arrivals of Ian Taylor, Dan Petrescu, Ian Nolan and Klas Ingesson. And he certainly had an eventful debut for the club, a 4-3 home defeat by Spurs which was primarily notable for their opponents' debutant Jurgen Klinsmann's "diving" goal celebration.

But that first season turned out to be a difficult one for the club. With star striker David Hirst missing much of the season with injury, there were points at which Wednesday were in danger of relegation. The arrival of Guy Whittingham in December quelled goalscoring concerns a little, and Atherton will have taken considerable satisfaction from a 5-1 win against his former club Coventry, three days after Christmas. Despite a 7-1 home defeat against Nottingham Forest on, appropriately enough, April Fool's Day 1995, they finished the season in 13th place in the table.

Wednesday had started the season among the favourites to finish in a European position, and manager Trevor Francis paid for this underachievement with his job at the end of the season. But the following season under David Pleat was, if anything, even more disappointing, with the team finishing 15th after having been in a lower-mid-table position for most of the season. The following season, however, saw them briefly top the Premier League table with four straight wins at the start of the season before finishing 7th.

Atherton was a more than solid performer throughout this time. Able to play at centre-back, right-back or in a defensive midfield position, he was both versatile and consistent, becoming a favourite with the fans as some of the club's higher-profile signings started to fall flat throughout the latter stages of the decade.

But by the end of the decade, the wheels were starting to fall off their wagon as previous overspending started to catch up with Sheffield Wednesday. As then-CEO Alan Sykes told journalist David Conn for his 2004 book, The Beautiful Game?: "[Money] was absolutely haemorrhaging out. Our debts climbed gradually. The contracts were a millstone round our necks, but we have to deal with them. Then we ended up in a relegation battle, so that is a pretty potent combination of problems."

The 1999-2000 season was a catastrophe for the club. They'd finished the previous campaign in a respectable 12th place in the Premier League, but started the new season by taking just one point from their first eight games, including an infamous 8-0 defeat at Newcastle United in which Alan Shearer scored five times, and finished the season 19th in the table, with only Watford below them. They haven't returned to the top flight since.

This also marked the end of the line for David Atherton and Sheffield Wednesday. He'd turned thirty in April 2000 and his contract with the club had expired. Keen to stay in the Premier League, he signed on a free transfer for Bradford City, who'd avoided relegation from the top-flight themselves on the last day of the season with an unlikely win against Liverpool, and although they were relegated at the end of the following season, Atherton stayed with them until 2005 before finishing off his playing career in the non-league game with Halifax Town. By the time he left Hillsborough, he held the record for Premier League appearances, with 293.

Following the highs of the first half of the 1990s, the second half was a period of quiet decline behind the scenes for Sheffield Wednesday which only truly manifested throughout that catastrophic 1999-2000 season. But Peter Atherton, arguably the definition of a 'stalwart' player, remained popular with fans, even though he couldn't quite achieve the success that the club had managed throughout the first half of that decade.