February 1979. Trevor Francis is on the front page and back page of every newspaper.
Why? He has just become the most expensive player in English football history.
The fee? £1 million.
No-one could believe it. Surely one man could not be worth seven figures! Oh how times have changed!
Nowadays a £1 million transfer would be considered a bargain in League One. And to get Trevor Francis, a player who Fabio Capello labelled the best English player to ever play in Serie A, you would have to pay in excess of at least £12m.
But more and more money is being poured into sport. The fact that the play-off winner of the Championship, the second tier of English football, will receive an estimated £60 million, more than the winner of the Premier League, shows how much it has grown.
And further proof if you needed it is in the record transfer fees. This record was broken six times in the fifty years between 1905 and 1955. In the fifty years between 1955 and 2005, it has been broken 21 times, ten of which were in the ten years between 1991 and 2001.
Businessmen and women have realised the potential of sport to make money. They take over football teams and splash the cash on big players in order to win trophies. Roman Abramovich is an example of this.
But it's not just football. Sport around the world is growing and growing, with transfer fees, wages, and prize money getting bigger and bigger.
Take cricket for example. The ECB have recently doubled the player's win bonuses. Why? Because of the growth of twenty20 cricket. They are solving money problems with money.
Lets look at the recent twenty20 growth. Not long ago it was the IPL everyone was talking about, with the unprecedented prize funds and lucrative contracts.
Low and behold, along comes the Cricket Champions League. Suddenly, the IPL is pocketing money compared to this. A prize fund of a staggering £2.5 million. The astronomical rise of twenty20 cricket had reached its zenith.
Oh no it hadn't! Today the ECB is set to agree to a series of twenty20 matches that will eclipse even the Champions League. In matches between West Indies All Star XI and England, every player on the winning team will get £500,000 each!
And the players on the bench get £500,000 to share between them! With all the other bonuses, including £3.5 million to the ECB and WICB, the overall prize fund totals at a massive £10 million.
The mastermind behind this? Sir Allen Stanford, Texan billionaire, another businessman realising the potential.
And he has helped twenty20 cricket become the fastest growing sport in the world. The prize funds aren't quite as much as the ridiculous fees involved in football yet, but if it carries on like this, it's only matter of time.
Another sport with huge money involved now is boxing. You just have to look at the Hatton v Mayweather fight back in December to get an idea of some of the figures involved.
The top boxers get millions and millions of pounds for every fight!
Now even I would be willing to get in the ring with Floyd Mayweather for millions of pounds!
I don't know the exact figures of some of the NFL or NBA transfer, but I gather they are in excess on $50 million on some occasions.
Almost every sport around the world is becoming more of a business than a game now. The money involved is too great to consider taking big risks. The money you get from TV deals, shirt sales and tickets are all affected by how you play.
If Manchester United didn't play such good football last season, they would have missed out on millions in prize money for winning the EPL and the Champions League, millions in TV revenue next season, millions in ticket sales, and millions from shirt sales, especially if Cristiano Ronaldo didn't have such a great season.
It could be the main reason Real Madrid want Ronaldo, for shirt sales and money. It is well known that David Beckham repaid his transfer fee in shirt sales alone in just two days after joining them. Ronaldo could be another of those players.
But around the world, sport is growing and growing, getting richer and richer, but perhaps losing some of its sparkle that made it so successful in the first place.
In fact, the only sport I can think of that hasn't been hugely affected by money is Rugby, and that may only be a matter of time.
