EUROPEAN STAYCATION
Dinnage to become the second woman to lead one of sport’s top leagues
And the final European berth in next year’s women’s World Cup soccer showcase in France goes to ... the Netherlands, which tied Switzerland 1-1 in the second leg of their playoff — despite captain Anouk Dekker’s early red card — and won 4-1 on aggregate.
LONDON— Susanna Dinnage, a senior executive at Discovery Communications, was named the next chief executive of the Premier League on Tuesday, a position that will make her one of the most prominent women in professional sports.
Dinnage will replace the Premier League’s outgoing executive chairman, Richard Scudamore, who is resigning later this year after nearly two decades leading the organization. Scudamore’s job will be split in two in a new structure, the league said, with Dinnage as chief executive alongside a nonexecutive chairman.
With Scudamore at the helm, the Premier League grew into a sporting goliath. It is by far the most popular domestic league in world soccer, a sporting superpower that generates global television rights income worth more than three billion pounds each season.
The five-person team appointed by the league to hire Scudamore’s replacement had managed to keep their prefer- ence for Dinnage a secret until Tuesday, when they convened a special meeting of the league’s 20 teams to announce her as their preference. Dinnage, whose broad experience in broadcasting and digital media appealed to the Premier League’s search team, joins an industry where women in leadership positions continue to be the exception rather than the rule.
The only other female leader of one of soccer’s top leagues is Nathalie Boy de la Tour, the president of France’s Ligue de Football Professionnel. FIFA, soccer’s governing body, appointed the former United Nations official Fatma Samoura as its secretary-general in 2016.
“We had a very strong field, but Susanna was the outstanding choice given her track record in managing complex businesses through transformation and digital disruption,” said Bruce Buck, the chairman of Chelsea FC, who led the league’s nominations committee. Dinnage, who has been with Discovery for the past decade, most recently led Animal Planet, one of the company’s biggest channels.
The Premier League has prospered since its inception in the early 1990s on the strength of record-breaking television contracts, and as the beneficiary of bidding competitions in which cable and satellite providers around the world repeatedly drove up the price to acquire the rights to broadcast its matches.
Dinnage arrives at the Premier League amid a time of great change, however; with media consumption habits changing, she will be charged with figuring out a strategy to keep the money flowing as consumption of Premier League matches — in Britain, but also in places as far afield as Bangkok and Boston — increasingly shifts to online platforms.
In two decades at the Premier League, Scudamore managed to keep the competition together amid rising tension between its richest teams — wealthy northern clubs like Manchester United, Manchester City, and Liverpool, and the London powerhouses Arsenal, Chelsea and Tottenham — and the rest. The most powerful clubs’ battle for a greater slice of league revenue most likely will intensify in the coming years, as will new threats. Earlier this month, for example, leaked documents obtained by a consortium of European news media groups showed that some of the continent’s top teams, including Premier League giants like United and Liverpool, had been involved in discussions about a possible breakaway competition.
Dinnage’s tasks also will include figuring out a way of keeping the Premier League, one of Britain’s biggest international success stories, prospering if the country follows through on plans to exit the European Union.
Dinnage will not assume her new role until 2019, the league said, as her start date will depend on coming talks with Discovery. But Discovery’s president, J.B. Perette, endorsed her for the new role.
“She has been a fantastic teammate for all of us at Discovery, and we are delighted that she has been given this unique and groundbreaking opportunity to lead one of the world’s pre-eminent sports organizations,” Perette said in a statement released by the league.