English Premier League gets its first female supremo in Dinnage

CEODESIGNATE The new chief will take over from outgoing chairman Richard Scudamore

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, 51, will replace the Premier League’s outgoing executive chairman, Richard Scudamore, who is resigning later this year after nearly two decades leading the organisation.

Scudamore’s job will be split in two in a new structure, the league said, with Dinnage as chief executive alongside a non-executive 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 $3 billion pounds each season.

The five-person team appointed by the league to hire Scudamore’s replacement had managed to keep their preference 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 secretarygeneral 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