All the football gossip, but at 49p a minute
Premium-rate phone lines lured fans to call in with tantalising promises of big exclusives,
It promoted stories such as ‘Sensational swoop for Romanian’. All you had to do was dial 0870
There are some concepts that the millennial generation will struggle to comprehend existed in the pre-internet era.
That millions of people used physically to buy a single from Our Price and millions more used genuinely to care which record was No 1 in the charts at Christmas.
The idea of having to walk or drive to your local Blockbuster to rent a film that you then had to return under pain of death.
Perhaps most mystifying of all to anyone born in the 1990s would be the notion of premium-rate football phone lines in the guise of Teamtalk and Clubcall: paying up to 49p a minute to hear the latest gossip about your football team.
Gossip is perhaps a generous description of what it offered. Frequently it was rehashed stories from that morning’s tabloids with a smattering of injury updates of dubious authenticity, but every so often there lurked a nugget of transfer gold. And that is all it took to get you hooked. Clubcall was linked to Teletext, ITV’S punchier version of Ceefax. It promoted stories such as “Sensational swoop for Romanian star”. All you had to do was dial 0870…
The trap is set. In your head, you are thinking Gheorghe Hagi. With clammy hands and a beating heart, you dial the number. The familiar intro music plays. By the time it finishes you are already 49p down. Then a presenter, taking as many unnecessary pauses as possible, runs through the main stories.
Of course the identity of the Romanian is not revealed at this point, but the breathless manner in which the presenter talks it up means it must be big. It must be Hagi.
First, though, an update on Steve Potts’s fitness that takes a solid two minutes. Then an account of the reserve team’s 2-2 draw away to Aston Villa, which is followed by an interview with the assistant coach. You become consciously aware that the second goal is being described in detail that a nuclear physicist would feel was a bit excessive. Another four minutes tick by.
Finally the big reveal. This is it. It is Hagi time. Only it is not Hagi time. It is Florin Raducioiu time. The sense of deflation is overwhelming.
The reporter informs you that there is competition for his signature all over Europe. The phrase “goal machine” is used at one point. He has played for AC Milan so he cannot be that bad. Maybe he will be the next Hagi? Or George Weah?
Still it will not be long until the sense of buyer’s remorse begins. Only your parents were the buyers and in about a month’s time, when the BT bill comes through the post, there is going to be a finger pointed squarely in your direction.
Protests that it could have been Hagi will not wash, particularly as it was not Hagi but Florin Raducioiu.
This pattern was repeated all over the country. There were dozens of stories of people failing to hang up and being landed with £200-plus phone bills. At one point, Clubcall was receiving 12 million calls a season.
With clubs gaining a significant slice of the revenue in return for providing access, it provided almost as much revenue to the Premier League as Barclays, the title sponsor. Teamtalk was even floated on the London Stock Exchange. Like Blockbuster and Our Price, its business plan was left in tatters by the widespread introduction of broadband; but both Teamtalk and Clubcall are still going.
In a time when the source of information on your club was limited to what newspapers were left in your newsagents, Clubcall and Teamtalk’s promise of immediacy and tantalising exclusivity was an intoxicating combination, particularly when you thought it involved Gheorghe Hagi.