Blackburn Rovers raided Norwich City bargain-bin and came out with a title-winner | OneFootball

Received wisdom has it that Blackburn Rovers 'bought' the Premier League title in 1995, but their captain cost less than half a million pounds.

When Blackburn Rovers won the Premier League in 1995, the suggestion was that they'd "bought the title", but their captain and one of the key players was a bargain.

The rise of Blackburn Rovers in the early 1990s was one of the biggest football stories of the era.

Fuelled by the money of Sir Jack Walker and with Kenny Dalglish brought in to manage the team, Rovers went from second-tier also-rans with a ground in desperate need of renewal to being the champions of England in less than five years.

But while a lot of money was spent on some of their players - £3.3 million on Alan Shearer and £5 million on Chris Sutton, for example - not everybody they brought in cost them a huge amount of money. Indeed, the man who lifted the Premier League title at Anfield on the last day of the 1994-95 season cost Rovers less than a tenth the amount that Sutton alone had.

Blackburn Rovers were transformed by Jack Walker's money

There was little in the early years of Chris Sutton's career to suggest that he would end up a Premier League-winning captain. Born in Borehamwood, on the dividing line between London and Hertfordshire, Sherwood started his career at Watford in 1987, playing for them for two years before moving on to Norwich City.

Sherwood's arrival at Ewood Park came just as Blackburn's ascent was starting to gather pace. Jack Walker had first become involved at Blackburn in 1987, but it wasn't until 1991 that he assumed full ownership of the club, and to start off with it didn't look like there would be much of a revolution to come at all, with Rovers finishing 19th in the Second Division at the end of his first season running the club.

But change was coming, and a shockwave was sent through the game when the former Liverpool manager Kenny Dalglish was appointed as their manager in October 1991. Blackburn finished the 1991-92 season in 6th place in the First Division, but then beat Leicester City 1-0 to secure promotion into the inaugural season of the Premier League.

Sherwood played a pivotal role as Blackburn won the 1995 Premier League title

Blackburn made headlines in the summer of 1992 when they broke the British transfer fee record by paying Southampton £3.6 million to take an up-and-coming young striker by the name of Alan Shearer to Ewood Park. But plenty of other players were also arriving at the club who cost a lot less than this, and Sherwood was among them.

His Norwich team had just avoided being one of those replaced by Rovers, having finished the 1991-92 season in 18th place in a 22-team division. £400,000 was all it took to get him to sign for Blackburn that summer. They finished the 1992-93 season in 4th place in the Premier League, and the following season ended with them as runners-up to Manchester United. Sherwood had initially struggled to get into the team, but within a couple of years he was their captain.

The UK record transfer fee was broken again by Blackburn in the summer of 1994, and they returned to Sherwood's old stomping ground to do so, paying Norwich £5 million to take Chris Sutton to Ewood Park as a foil for Alan Shearer. It was the final piece in the jigsaw. Rovers stormed out of the traps at the start of the 1994-95 season, winning five and drawing two of their first seven games of the season.

It wasn't entirely plain sailing. When Manchester United won 4-2 at Ewood Park on the 23rd October, the result left Rovers in fourth place in the table and eight points off the top. But what happened next was incredible. Blackburn won eleven and drew one of their next 12 games, and by the middle of January they were six points clear at the top of the Premier League, though that lead was shortened to three points when United completed a League double over them by beating them 1-0 at Old Trafford.

And Tim Sherwood's role in all of this was pivotal. He played in 38 of their 42 League games throughout that season, scoring six times. Blackburn did limp over the line, a little. Having lost just four league games going into the home straits, they lost three of their last five matches, including defeats to both of Manchester United's big two rivals, Manchester City and Liverpool. But on the last day of the season, as Blackburn were beaten 2-1 at Liverpool, Manchester United lost 1-0 at West Ham and Rovers were the champions, with Sherwood lifting the Premier League trophy after the match.

This couldn't last, of course. Blackburn finished the 1995-96 season in 7th place in the Premier League, while their assault on the Champions League ended with them bottom their group, eliminated before their final match was even played, and with Sherwood having to break up an on-pitch fight between David Batty and Graeme Le Saux in Moscow. Alan Shearer left for Newcastle for another record-breaking transfer fee - £15 million, this time - and in 1999 Blackburn were relegated in 19th place. Sherwood left the club that summer to join Tottenham Hotspur.

Blackburn Rovers both did and didn't "buy the league" in 1995. On the one hand, it's difficult to consider yourselves as 'plucky underdogs' when you've broken the record transfer fee twice in the last three years and your team is managed by someone who's already managed a team to be champions of England on three different occasions.

But on the other hand, far from all of Blackburn's 1995 title-winning team were multi-million pound signings. Crucial defenders Colin Hendry and Graeme Le Saux each cost £700,000, while Henning Berg cost £400,000 and midfielder Stuart Ripley cost £250,000. Blackburn spent a lot of money in the positions that mattered. On top of Shearer and Sutton, the £2.4 million they paid for Tim Flowers was a record transfer fee for a goalkeeper at the time.

And as for Tim Sherwood, well, Blackburn got 285 Premier League appearances out of the midfielder for their £400,000, and he led them to promotion and an unforgettable League championship. It seems fair to say that Rovers got excellent value for money out of him.