The fall and rise and rise of Premier footy
The Club: How the Premier League Became the Richest, Most Disruptive Business in Sport by Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg, Hodder & Stoughton, $55. Reviewed by Rod Liddle.
It could all have been so different for poor Tottenham Hotspur, English football’s gallant long underachievers. They were the first club that an absurdly wealthy Russian oligarch, Roman Abramovich, fancied turning into world beaters. He got as far as having discussions with the Spurs chairman, but then made the mistake of taking a drive down Tottenham High Rd in his Merc. ‘‘This,’’ he said to his
Russian associate, ‘‘is worse than Omsk.’’
Abramovich shifted his sights to the more upmarket surroundings of Fulham Broadway, and acquired Chelsea instead.
The rest, as they say, is history.
That was in the first few years of the present century and marked the third stage in the transformation of English football’s top division from a ragtag agglomeration of impecunious losers to bastions of unimaginable wealth: the arrival, one after another, of extraordinarily rich foreign owners. Arabs, Russians, Americans, Chinese, Spaniards, Thais, swarming around the biggest clubs, anxious for a slice of the lucrative action. Some of them were genuine sports fans, others canny businessmen with no interest in the game. Some were fraudsters, gangsters, thugs, or just idiots with more money than sense.
But the Premier League couldn’t care less, so long as the dosh was on the table. In 2007, Manchester City was bought for £81.6 million (NZ$154m) by the former prime minister of Thailand, Thaksin Shinawatra, who had just been ousted in a coup and was sentenced to prison in absentia for his role in a crooked land deal. Several organisations wondered if this background made him a ‘‘fit and proper’’ person to own a British football club, and wrote to the Premier League to express their concerns. The Premier League replied to the effect that its ‘‘fit and proper’’ test concerned itself only with financial irregularities.
This fascinating book, by two witty and meticulous sports writers, tells the full story of the top division’s incredible transformation over three decades into an institution that could happily bung its outgoing chairman, Richard Scudamore, a £5m thank-you payment, and not even notice the loose change was missing. It has been, as the authors put it, sport’s wildest gold rush.
‘‘In the span of 25 years, the league’s 20 clubs have increased their combined value by more than 10,000 per cent, from around £50m in 1992 to £10b today.’’ The big mystery is that this astonishing boom has not been followed by a bust – yet.
Initially, two things made this transformation possible: ambitious and far-sighted chairmen who wished to separate their clubs from the rest of the football league and thus keep a greater proportion of revenue, and the advent of satellite television.
In 1985, football was in the doldrums. Attendances were declining. Football matches were played in dilapidated stadiums in front of fans who, for the most part, stood to watch and waded through lagoons of urine to relieve themselves in noisy lean-tos. The threat of football hooliganism was perpetual. Clubs got their money almost exclusively from these declining attendances, as there was little cash coming in from broadcasters. Live games were not allowed.
Seen from the outside, football was a decaying and decrepit business that you simply wouldn’t invest in. But that handful of chairmen (preeminently Liverpool’s Rick Parry, David Dein at Arsenal, and Martin Edwards at Manchester United) could envisage a different future.
Their first act was to try to extricate themselves from the Football League. The next was to strike deals with new companies (primarily Sky) for lucrative contracts that would include, later on, the televising of live games.
As the money flowed in, the next stage was the transformation of football grounds: vast all-seater stadiums with pleasant facilities. With the new money rolling in came the brilliant foreign stars who gilded this league with their exotic skills. English football slowly began to transform on the pitch, as well as off.
Attendances did not drop as a consequence of televised football. Counter-intuitively, perhaps, they rose and rose. Even more counter-intuitively, the partial separation of the top division from the rest has not remotely hurt the lower leagues.
When will it stop?