Informative insight into the rise of the Premier League

BOOKS COMBINING sport and business as the chief subject matter don’t always hit the right spot. Getting the balance correct is never easy, especially when there’s a requirement to make it readable in the midst of the obligatory facts and figures needed to support the points being made.

In that regard alone, authors Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg, both from the Wall Street Journal stable, deserve credit for the methodology used in ‘The Club - How the Premier League became the richest, most disruptive business in sport’.

It’s incredible to think about the changes in the game of football since pressure exerted by the bigger clubs eventually led to the formation of the Premier League in 1992.

And if you want to get a complete appraisal, then this book won’t let you down because it is informative and entertaining in equal measure.

The central role played by television and the acquisition of rights to show the games all over the world is an ongoing theme, with the money involved rising with every passing year.

It’s all a far cry from my early teens in the 1980s, when the football coverage on the box could be mapped out very easily: Sportsnight with Harry Carpenter every Wednesday, Bob Wilson’s

Football Focus plus the ‘ Saint and

Greavsie’ on Saturdays, Jimmy Hill and Match of the Day that night, and finally Brian Moore’s The Big Match on

Sunday afternoon.

Nowadays, in any given week, it’s quite an easy task to find a live match on every single night across a range of leagues if you are so inclined.

The development of the business empire that is the Premier League in just one-quarter of a century has utterly transformed the old game as we used to know it in so many different ways.

It is now very much an international brand, with foreign owners and players commonplace, not to mention avid audiences for the matches week on week in an incredible 185 countries.

It has a global reach, a far cry from the first weekend of the Premier League in 1992 when only 13 footballers from outside the British Isles played in the opening round matches.

Just seven years later, Chelsea made history by becoming the first team to field a starting eleven composed entirely of non-natives against Southampton, and it’s now got to the stage where English players find it extremely hard to feature on a regular basis.

Near the end of the book, the authors write about Spurs’ current temporary location in Wembley, noting that $2 billion is currently what it costs to field a Premier League team. And as for the combined value of the 22 players at the game they attended, it comfortably exceeded the overall worth of all 22 back when the competition took its first tentative steps in the early 1990s.

That serves as a stark reminder of the colossal figures involved in the modern game and, judging by the going rate for transfers, the big spending is set to continue.

It’s facilitated by TV companies paying eye-watering sums of money to secure the rights year on year, and this book has spoken to numerous high-ranking club executives to give the reader a complete insight into how it all works.

The authors have done a very thorough job it must be said, and it’s well worth a read at some stage if you ever wondered why involvement in the Premier League, regardless of finishing position, is one of the most lucrative places for a club owner to be in world sport. ALAN AHERNE

Visit The Book Centre on Wexford’s Main Street for the very best selection of sports books.