Nobody who was in the room when the Premier League was founded knew the beast it would become, even if they pretend otherwise.
They didn’t see Jack Walker buying the Premier League title in 1995, let alone the Super Size Me arrivals of Roman Abramovich and Sheikh Mansour.
Football was dying until Rupert Murdoch established his Sky broadcast empire on the back of it. The previous decade had seen the game in financial ruin, almost destroyed by hooliganism, corruption and dwindling attendances.
Fast forward 32 years and we’ve got the richest, most powerful and popular league in the world, followed globally.
And while fans are still the lifeblood, let’s not be naïve and forget the revolution has only been made truly possible by broadcasters and those club benefactors who have flocked in and provided huge sums of money.
Sky lit the economic fire and owners built magnificent stadiums, paid salaries for the world’s top talent and more recently clubs survived Covid when £1billion was lost.
No one knew the Premier League would become a global powerhouse until Roman Abramovich arrived on the scene at Chelsea
Sheikh Mansour then took over at Man City and the Premier League is now the most popular in the world
But fans are not happy with rising ticket prices, and protests took place outside Old Trafford over the weekend
We have different types of owners in our elite league. Gulf states use sport as a vehicle for influence. Local businessmen like Tony Bloom (Brighton) and Matthew Benham (Brentford) bought the clubs they supported.
But by far the most prevalent kind of owner these days comes from the USA, who want to make money and run their clubs as a business to ultimately create media and profit opportunities.
If Daniel Friedkin’s group complete their takeover at Everton, half the Premier League will be American-led. Is their model more palatable? It’s not a binary call but here’s the rub – once you’ve opened the Premier League for business as we’ve done, you can’t stop it.
Unless you are going to halt the globalisation of sport, change is inevitable and you have to embrace and manage it, while trying to protect core principles.
What is the alternative? Imposing a regulator who might give football clubs a special status like a blue plaque on the door like a Grade 2-listed building. In society and business, it is often mooted the need for less Government and a relaxation on interference, so why would you then do the opposite in football?
Can you imagine a regulator in 1992? It would have stymied all the progress we’ve made, from being regarded as the sick man of European football to becoming one of the UK´s best exports.
I don’t ignore the risk of overseas owners failing to connect with their club’s community or challenging issues like the cost to fans. But for the Premier League to have achieved what it has, that may just be the price on the ticket, metaphorically and literally.
Whereas English and European football is seeded in promotion and relegation – your position in the pyramid is generally dependent on sporting merit – the American mentality is different.
Tony Bloom (pictured) owns the club he supports in Brighton & Hove Albion
Matthew Benham (left) is also in charge of his boyhood club at Brentford, but the game has gone global and there are now more American owners coming into the Premier League
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Their franchise owners are effectively business partners who don’t want the lottery of short-term results to endanger longer-term planning and investments.
I’ve lived in America and part-owned a sports team there. They provide outcomes where nobody dominates leagues. It’s not a monopoly like France or Germany, or recently in England.
Would you sacrifice promotion and relegation in order to guarantee more competition in terms of challenging for trophies? There is merit in both.
There is an argument that the current English framework is itself anti-competitive. The 20 Premier League clubs receive 90 per cent of the broadcast revenues, with the remainder shared among the other 72 EFL teams. How does that provide you with the theatre of dreams?
There are relatively smaller outfits like Brentford, Bournemouth and my own Crystal Palace who are capable of surviving in the Premier League, but it would be wrong to describe them as minnows. Look at the investment they’ve made, hundreds of millions of pounds, to take their place at the top table. And that’s without a chance of finishing first.
It may well be we don’t have any British owners in 10 years time. A sale of Tottenham could come into play.
We can see there is a blowback against some of the economic realities. We saw fans protest at Old Trafford last weekend about the price of tickets and removal of concessions. They probably have a point but we should also remember how the Premier League has become this juggernaut.
Who is paying for that? The punter doesn’t seem to want to while telling everyone it’s their club and that the chairman should get their chequebook out and possibly sack the manager in the morning!
Fans blame greed from owners such as John W Henry (pictured) for prices going up
But they should also look at wage demands from players such as Mo Salah as he moves towards the final six months of his Liverpool contract
United fans have turned on Sir Jim Ratcliffe for the first time as well, but owners do need some help with funding their club
I’ve heard the argument that clubs are rich enough to subsidise prices. Even if tickets are only 20 per cent of revenue, that’s £40milion of sales to the average Premier League club. It’s hardly nothing!
The argument is rising prices are steeped in greed. Whose avarice are we referring to? Seventeen of the 20 top-flight clubs operate at a loss. If there is greed anywhere it’s from players, agents and managers.
Maybe owners shouldn’t bow to players’ wage demands but the economics of sport and ambition have driven it this way. Is John W Henry at Liverpool meant to lower admission prices and still pay Mo Salah a king’s ransom to keep him at Anfield. How does that work?
Everything about football is expensive. If fans resist – and to some extent rightly so – the shortfall has to be made up elsewhere. If there is a rise in broadcast piracy because subscriptions are considered too high, revenues from rights deals will fall. Does that mean paying more at the turnstile?
Fans will protest that too. But if nobody really wants to pay top dollar, how do you keep a top-dollar product? Reducing concessions is unpopular but with that as well, there are hard truths to confront. When you give concessions, you are taking away income and revenue.
Around 70 per cent of capacity at Premier League stadiums is reserved for season-ticket holders so it’s not right to say it’s being killed off – even though clubs may financially miss out because regular match-goers are less likely to spend in shops and bars than the so-called tourists.
Supporters do have a right to be concerned and my ambivalence is not based on disinterest for the average man or woman in the street.
It’s more to do with pragmatism. We have the best football in the world and somebody, somewhere has to pay for it.
Focus on football!
The tangle involving Crystal Palace skipper Marc Guehi and his rainbow armband is due to players being asked by football to promote causes when there is no necessity.
Marc Guehi wrote messages on his rainbow armband for two consecutive matches
Sam Morsy refused to wear the rainbow armband at all, and this has now become a pickle of the FA’s own making
I don’t know why Premier League captains were asked to join a LGBTQ+ campaign in a sport which already has zero tolerance towards discrimination and whose players and followers are made up of different religious beliefs.
Guehi would have been better off not wearing the armband at all – as Ipswich captain Sam Morsy opted for – rather than displaying the message ‘Jesus loves you’.
Now the FA are in a pickle of their own making. Any punishment for Guehi would be unpopular. But they’d already issued a warning.
It would be better if football focused on being entertainment rather than advocating for societal change. I prefer the pitch to be a place of neutrality where the only message is to come and enjoy yourself.
