When Andy Roxburgh put on the 3D glasses, he didn’t know whether he was looking at the future or sci-fi. Uefa’s technical director was at studios in Tokyo, being shown the latest Japanese television technology. Developers believe they are close to 3D broadcasting good enough for viewers to feel they are experiencing the “real thing”. Roxburgh was asked to imagine a World Cup final in Yokohama and fans packing stadiums worldwide on to whose pitches the match was beamed in life-size 3D.

If predicting in football were easy, everyone would win the pools, but 24 years ago The Sunday Times did a rather good job. That year, 1985, English clubs were banned from Europe, gates hit all-time lows, sponsors and TV companies looked to other sports, hooliganism held sway. Fans died in stadiums — and Hillsborough was still four years away. This newspaper compared a Real Madrid-Barcelona derby and a match between Arsenal and Everton, the English champions, played on the same Saturday. There were 108,000 at the Nou Camp and 10m watched live on television. Barely 25,000 saw Everton beat Arsenal 6-1 at Goodison. Not even highlights were broadcast.

The Sunday Times dreamed of brighter times. Under a headline of “Football 2000”, it looked forward to the millennium and asked: what if the tired First Division was replaced by an exciting super league powered by TV money? What if stadiums were gleaming and family-friendly? How about English matches being the equal of those in Spain? The Premier League uncovered the article in preparing a submission it will make tomorrow to Andy Burnham, the culture, media and sport secretary. It is being asked to justify itself on a number of issues, from competitive balance between teams, to fit and proper persons testing of club owners. While not claiming to have made everything perfect, the league will remind Burnham where English football was a generation ago. But where is it going? Repeating the exercise of “Football 2000”, we asked experts in various aspects of the game for their visions.

Finance and ownership

“In 1991-92, the year before the Premier League, the aggregate revenue of top-flight clubs was £170m. By 2006-7 it was £1.53bn. Wealth has grown by an average 16% per year,” says Paul Rawnsley, director of Deloitte Sports Business Group. “It’s difficult to imagine such rises going forward, but I still expect the Premier League to get richer and richer. Football is not getting any less popular, and it’s the most-followed league on the planet. It’s only going to get harder for other big leagues to compete.”

Seven of Europe’s richest 20 clubs are English, according to the 2009 edition of the Deloitte Money League. The figure would have been higher, but for sterling’s sudden fall against the euro. Rawnsley expects English clubs to account for more than half the top 20 within a few years.

“Between 95% and 98% of their revenue still comes from within the UK,” he says. “Revenue growth will come from clubs’ global fan bases through tours, friendlies abroad, commercial activities and people in foreign territories accessing media content.”

The other area is stadiums. “Matchday revenues are where English clubs truly outdo European rivals. Premier League clubs generate more than twice those in La Liga and five times Serie A,” Rawnsley says.

Pressure on the likes of Liverpool and Tottenham to build new stadiums will increase. So will foreign ownership. “The return on owning a football club is not through annual dividends but capital appreciation — the club’s value going up and up,” says Rawnsley. “It happened for the Glazers with Manchester United and has long been the model for US sports franchises.” By 2024, expect even more accents in English boardrooms to be American.

Coaching

Top football, notes Roxburgh, gets ever quicker and more intense. Coaching is more structured, teams more organised. “So how,” he asks, “do teams gain telling advantages, especially when it comes to breaking through opponents’ defensive blocks?” He was talking to Sir Alex Ferguson recently about one answer. “A trend is towards the ‘collective counter’. Alex has noticed it and says it’s new even for him.

“It’s counter-attacking which begins not in the traditional way — at the back, when the opposition are committed and lose possession — but in midfield, when the ball is stolen and a group of players uses fast combination passes to get through a block. The other team still has bodies in the way but for a moment it’s not organised and the key is the ‘transition moment’, how quickly from winning the ball you can hit them.”