How a secret dinner changed the face of English football The breakaway The TV deal
‘It was the FA’S league – so it was bewildering they allowed clubs to take all the money’
By late 1990, English football was in crisis. The game had become defined not by sporting achievements but by horrific tragedies and violence: Heysel, rioting on the terraces, the Bradford fire and Hillsborough. Attendances were in free-fall, the best players, such as Paul Gascoigne and David Platt, had fled abroad, and cash-starved clubs were desperately scrabbling to implement the Taylor report and upgrade decrepit stadiums.
“It was clear there needed to be change,” says Rick Parry, who would become the first chief executive of the Premier League. “Sadly it took Hillsborough to realise we needed a radically different approach.”
A group of forward-thinking men were in charge of the “Big Five” clubs: David Dein at Arsenal, Martin Edwards at Manchester United, Irving Scholar at Tottenham, Noel White at Liverpool and Philip Carter at Everton. They believed football could thrive again.
They were led by Dein, Arsenal’s ambitious vice-chairman. “If there was one person who created the Premier League it was David Dein,” says Greg Dyke, then chief executive of London Weekend Television and also the chairman of ITV Sport. “In an industry that didn’t really look ahead, David did.”
Dein, a fan of American sport, was fed up with the Football League’s voting structure, where a complex system: First Division clubs got 1.5 votes each, Second Division clubs one vote each, and Third and Fourth Division eight votes between them, meant the big clubs were almost always outvoted. He had previously proposed three ideas to help market the sport: extending half-time from 10 to 15 minutes; having two substitutions per game instead of one; and printing names and numbers on each player’s jersey – a pitch he made with shirts bearing the legends “ADAMS 6”, “SHEARER 9” and “GIGGS 11”.
All were rejected. It was felt 15 minutes was too long, that smaller clubs would not want to pay a bonus to a second substitute and – in the words of one club executive – “we don’t have enough laundry room to go past 11 shirts”.
It crystallised the Big Five’s resentment of the Football League, with the division of TV rights another huge issue. Dein and Carter had negotiated the £44million, four-year deal with Dyke’s ITV in 1988 – negotiations which had started with Dyke attempting to buy rights just to the Big Five’s matches.
In their view, the Big Five brought in the majority of the money but saw precious little of it with the TV cash split 50 per cent, 25 per cent, 12.5 and 12.5 between Divisions One to Four.
“The Football League at that stage was being run by the old Second Division,” says Dyke. “They were poncing around as if they had all the power whereas the power lay with the big clubs if they chose to use it.”
The plot
‘They couldn’t believe the money’ A key reason why they did use that power was Dyke himself. As Parry put it, “Greg was the catalyst for it all.” Dyke had been, in his own words, “the first person to pay real money for football” as he broke up the BBC-ITV cartel that the Big Five felt had kept rights artificially low. Dyke and Dein had remained particularly close – they still are – since meeting in 1988, even travelling together to Anfield for the 1989 title decider on Arsenal’s private plane.
In the champagne-soaked away dressing room after a match watched by 14 million television viewers, Dein turned to Dyke and informed him he had got the deal remarkably cheaply.
That would not happen again, with the clubs well aware of the finances Dyke had said would be on offer for them if they chose to break away.
“I took them out for a drink and they were asking how much we would pay,” Dyke recalls of a meeting when negotiating the previous deal. “I said, ‘one million each a season’. They couldn’t believe it [Arsenal’s annual turnover was £1.5 million at the time]. They had never seen that kind of money before.”
So, with the Football League in chaos, Dyke set up a dinner for the Big Five at LWT on the south bank of the Thames in October 1990 to inform them he would again offer to buy their rights separately.
“I got David to cajole the Big Five to come to this dinner,” Dyke, now 70, recalls. “I was the host. At that dinner it was revealed that David had a plan – and the plan was to break away.”
Yet the deal was far from done, and secrecy was paramount. The five trusted each other implicitly but knew they alone could not make up a league.
So each was assigned what was referred to as a “dancing partner”
– a club they had to convince to join. The five targeted were Aston Villa, Newcastle United, Nottingham Forest, Sheffield Wednesday and West Ham, on the basis that if the 10 biggest clubs joined, the others would have to follow.
‘There is no doubt the FA lost control’
The clubs knew they had no chance of success without the backing of the Football Association. Fifa and Uefa would never allow it and, in Parry’s words, “there was more respect for the FA then than now”.
So Dein and White went to Lancaster Gate to visit Sir Bert Millichip, the FA chairman, and Graham Kelly, the chief executive. They were expecting to be met with fury, so were flummoxed when their ideas were welcomed.
Alex Fynn, then an executive for Saatchi and Saatchi, explains: “What the two gentlemen [Dein and White] did not know was that I had persuaded the FA to do some research at that time. The results said that supporters of clubs in the First Division were in favour of a breakaway, and one of the main reasons – and this was a clincher for the FA – was that it would help the English national team.”
There were other factors at play. The FA and Football League loathed each other – the joke ran that the latter was based at Lytham St Annes because it was as far away from Lancaster Gate as possible. When Dein and White made their pitch the FA saw the chance to crush the League once and for all and commissioned Parry, then an executive with Ernst & Young, to work with the Big Five while Fynn helped draw up what became known as “The FA’S Blueprint for Football”.
“I advocated the FA build a true pyramid; a showcase division of 18 clubs, two national divisions under that of 20 clubs and three regional divisions of 20 clubs,” said Fynn.
“Where the plan came unstuck was that nobody was interested in anything but the top division. The big clubs cared about themselves and the FA failed to recognise the fact a 42-game top division would not help either of their two key properties – the FA Cup or the English national team. It was a lack of vision, a lack of competence and a large measure of self-serving.”
The number of teams in the top division was also becoming a key issue. Dein, a passionate England fan who had attended the 1966 World Cup final, supported an 18-team league with a mid-season break to help the national side. His fellow Big Five members did too, although smaller clubs that could lose out were less sure. It was central to the first meeting the FA held with the clubs at Lancaster Gate on May 8, 1991.
Parry recalled: “The question about the number of clubs came within the first five minutes – and the irony is that it came from Peter Swales, the chairman of the International Committee [and Manchester City] and so the one who cared more than most about the national team. But Sir Bert said, ‘It’s your league, you decide’. The message was that if the most fundamental decision was for us to decide then presumably everything else was.
“Ron Noades [Crystal Palace chairman], who was bright, shrewd and feisty, said we should go away and discuss. Bert said we were welcome to use the FA Council’s chamber. There is no doubt the FA lost control at that first meeting.”
The 22 top-flight clubs signed a “Founder Members Agreement”, a text whose rules are still largely in place, at the next gathering on June 13 and the Premier League was a reality 10 months after the dinner between Dyke and the Big Five, with Parry elected chief executive. The FA retained a “Golden Share”, which gave them the key vote if there was an impasse over major decisions, an influence they have never used, but made no request for influence or a cut of the income the Premier League would generate – a figure they were well aware of.
“The first Sky contract was £35.5 million for 60 games,” said Fynn. “It was the FA’S league – so it is bewildering they allowed the clubs to disappear with all the money.”
Dyke, who was FA chairman from 2013-16, has also had cause to lament the FA’S decision. “It is the great mistake in the FA’S history,” he says. “Here was an opportunity to be there at the beginning – and they didn’t do it. They were not visionaries.” ‘Blow them out of the f------ water’ A different battle had been raging all this while – TV negotiations involving three key players: ITV, the BBC and newly formed BSKYB.
Dyke and Sam Chisholm, a hard-nosed New Zealander brought in by Rupert Murdoch to breathe life into Sky, organised a secret lunch. Dyke said: “Sam said to me, ‘Mr Dyke, the only person who knows I am here is Rupert Murdoch. Now, what are we going to do to stop these clubs from f------ us?’ I thought we would get the contract anyway as we had the five biggest clubs voting for us on our side.” Dyke’s reasoning for Continued on page 8