Its not the agents driving the wages up, its the money the teams get from the Premier League, Champions League.
Its all the people who buy Sky, they are the people driving it up. All the agents do is react.
You are forgetting also, before the Premier League, Newcastle were not competing for anything, Their gates in the eighties/ early nineties were comparable to ours before its inception and they were rarely a top six side (if ever during that period).
Promoted teams got hidings before the Premier League, its not a new thing.
It was the Premier League money that got us out of jail to leave us debt free.
And many of the games I see from the seventies/ eighties are just frantic long ball affairs, crap quality on muddy pitches, no marking.
I really do not like all this money being the root of all football evil and how its ruined football. We rarely got to see the best players in the World before because they were all in Spain, Brazil, Italy etc.