The élitism started earlier than '92.
It began when the original so-called 'big five' - rags, Spurs, l'Arse and the two dippers - insisted that all gate money be retained by the home team.
Early '80s, I think it was.
It was brought in after the 80/81 season. That season the so-called Big 5 finished 3rd, 5th, 8th,10th and 15th. By the end of 84/85 they finished 1st,2nd,3rd,4th and 7th.
City were very much in favour of this at the time. Swales lobbied for it and voted for it, working closely with the chairmen of those other clubs to make it happen. Remember, over the period between 1975 and 1983, we were the third best supported club in aggregate behind Liverpool and United. Even in our relegation season in 1982/3, we were the fourth best supported, with Spurs also ahead of us that year. And this was despite our 82/3 average being 20% down on the previous season following the sale of Trevor Francis; everyone was suffering a drop in gates at the time, but none of the other big clubs suffered one anything near to being so dramatic in a single year. When we came back up in 1985/6, we had the fourth biggest gates behind the usual gruesome twosome plus reigning champions Everton.
The reason we didn't prosper as they did from this change was because Swales's financial mismanagement. He'd saddled us with such debt that, even with the financial boost this measure provided, we could barely pay the interest. If we'd been in a position to keep Trevor Francis and hadn't gone down in 1983, there's every chance that the Big Five would have been a Super Six (or some such). Swales would certainly have been pushing for it, and the profile of the club plus his position within the FA would IMO have meant the other 5 would have let us join in.
Anyway, we became shit so we remained morally clean. And now we can take the moral high ground when looking back on all this stuff! ;)
EDIT - One more point. Not having to share gate receipts with clubs who had comparatively tiny supports (Grimsby, Shrewsbury, Carlisle and the like) was a major reason why, even in pretty desperate financial straits, we were able to field a team that could challenge for promotion from the second tier under Billy McNeill. If the old rules had applied, I really think we could have seen a similar kind of side to our later one in the 1990s.