I feel I must point out we have twenty league championships and calling it two as if football started in 1992 while perfectly understandable for this amusing exercise still pisses me off.
You're correct to say Liverpool have won 20 titles. But it's also fair to differentiate between eras in which the game was fundamentally different. The Premier League's launch fundamentally altered the commercial side of the game, and the back-pass rule (same year) fundamentally altered the game itself. So it's understandable why the study confines itself to the Premier League era.
I don't really agree. You can also draw a semi-arbitrary line in the mid-2000s, when foreign oil money suddenly made Chelsea and City rise to the top of the league. The game evolves and that always has been the case. Other leagues underwent similar transformations, but they don't make this artificial bureaucratic distinction.
That's a stretch. Just because the rights were sold differently doesn't mean football was "fundamentally different" from one year to the next. Some tweaks to the game (and the ball) have been made over the years, but the game is fundamentally the same.
This really isn't true. The object of the game might be the same. But the backpass rule altered the game mechanics in a way that makes these separate eras impossible to compare in any kind of study.
> But the backpass rule altered the game mechanics
Nah, it didn’t. You’re overstating.
My memory of that time was general confusion of “why the name change?” And not much else. The game has certainly been tweaked, but your claim of it being fundamentally different doesn’t bear scrutiny.
Yes it did. The rule change ended the profoundly negative winning method of a team scoring a goal and then killing the game by passing the ball between defenders and the goalkeeper, who could scoop it up under any pressure. It isn't an overstatement to say this fundamentally altered the game.
Ok, so you have a different definition of 'fundamental' to me. My definition of fundamental change isn't "At the end of a game the team that's ahead passes the ball around in a slightly different way to waste time", that type of time wasting still occurred (and still occurs), just without the goalkeeper.
> it's also fair to differentiate between eras in which the game was fundamentally different.
Nah, it's just a lazy justification for breathless pundits and journalists to hail "the best ever" this or that, dropping 20th-century football history into a memory hole. The likes of Chelsea or Manchester City can "break records" every other year, generating easy work for the commentariat classes, and reminding little people that the only thing that matters is money. "Oh, your club was a league founder? But you're in the bananarama league now, sucks to be you."
Football statistics are always hilarious with random cutoffs and clauses to make them work. The game commentators are like: this is the first player to have 5 yellow cards in a season with have a left foot and being born in the year of the snake
It’s a funny thing, fandom.