EPL wasn’t always a global beast

LONDON » Somerville, Massachusetts, 26 May, 1989. Answerphone message, Beep:

“It’s your brother-in-law, Andre. Arsenal needed to win by two clear goals at Anfield to win the league and did it with almost the last kick of the match!”

And that tinny, brief and precious Trans-Atlantic message was how I found out in post-university U.S. exile how my North London team had its greatest moment since 1971, winning the First Division title at Liverpool, a team that had dominated the English game since the late 1970s.

It’s now globally known as the English Premier League, a multi-billion-dollar behemoth that is ubiquitous outside the stadiums in which it is played, paying some of the most eyewatering wages to international household names — Manchester United’s World Cup Winner, Paul Pogba, Arsenal’s Mesut Ozil, Chelsea’s Eden Hazard, Liverpool’s Mohammed Salah and Manchester City’s Sergio Aguero to name but a few of its biggest stars. The new season begins Friday and the hype is in overdrive.

And where does this marauding cash cow get its vast mountains of money? In Great Britain, Sky Sports and telecoms group BT pay nearly 5 billion pounds ($6.43 billion) per season to the EPL to show live games. The league’s 20 teams get a hefty cut, thus enabling huge wages for some superstars and also some extremely average players. In America, NBC has the broadcasting rights, for which it pays handsomely. A six-year contract through 2021-22 is worth about $1 billion. Stateside, games are shown in designated bars, or, via cable, on a phone or tablet.

Time zones are a challenge: get up early in the U.S. for weekend matches, watch later at night in parts of Asia. Acceptable to have a drink at 7.30am Eastern Time at kick off? Probably not. At Noon for the early evening game across the pond? Sure.

In the last few years, I’ve seen Arsenal play live on a screen from afar or caught video clips of goals seconds later online in several U.S. cities, France, The Netherlands, Greece, Morocco, Sri Lanka and Thailand. Failing that, there are countless live blogs or running commentary from increasingly agitated and deranged legions on Twitter.