In this piece I will look at those who have helped change the face of English football from a sport first and foremost to what has become one of the biggest businesses on a global scale. I will take you through the key changes that happened during the decades and show how they’ve helped shaped the national game into where it is today.
In January 1961 one man changed the course of football forever and although the impact he made wasn’t hugely significant at the time, fifty years later what he achieved for the players of his era has now changed the face of modern day football forever. At the top echelons of football worldwide it’s not just the owners that are rich - far from it. The players are now millionaires with money to burn, all a far cry from the days when back in January 1961, Jimmy Hill successfully brought about the end to the salary cap on footballers wages which stood at £20 per week. The first person to take advantage of the end of the cap was his fellow Fulham team mate Johnny Haynes who became football’s first player to earn £100 per week. Fast forward 50 years to the present day and compare that to the reported salary of Samuel Eto'o's salary at Russian club Anzhi Makhachkala which equates to a staggering amount of £167,825 per week.
If you read the history books of Portsmouth FC, it tells of a time during the club’s glory years during the 1930s and 40s where players would walk to the ground or if they were lucky cycle. Bonding sessions took place on the local bowling greens and come match day, the fans in the stands earned more than their heroes they watched on the pitch. There wasn’t a gap between the players and the fans. Come the end of the a home game, Pompey greats of the time talked about perks as being invited into a fans home after the game and being treated to a cup of tea and some biscuits. Players would have to have normal jobs as well to make ends meet. In the evenings you could walk into a pub and find a player stood chatting with a group of fans and even up to the days of West Ham and England legend Bobby Moore this was still quite common. Now to catch a glimpse of your heroes out and about you’d have to take a set of binoculars and watch as players who’ve never won anything in the game throw their money around like it’s going out of fashion behind roped off VIP area’s far removed from the fans. That’s not to stereotype all footballers into that category though I do hasten to add. It would be unfair to suggest that there aren’t a number of players who dedicate their spare time to helping others. But I guess that it’s those who make the pages of the national press day in and day out from their less than charitable action that sell papers. Charitable actions don’t sell newspapers it appears. At least Pompey can lay claim to one of the gentle giants in the game in the form of ex-player Linvoy Primus.
So if Jimmy Hill in his role as Chairman of the PFA had started the ball rolling in 1951, what else has helped changed the face of the game to see it where it has ended up so different many years later? Fast forward to 1995 and a little known Belgian player by the name of Jean-Mark Bosman was about to turn the game upside down on his head when he embarked on a judicial challenge of footballs transfer rules. His victory led to the now famous Bosman ruling which changed the way footballers are employed and allowed professional players in the EU to be able to move freely to another club at the end of their term of contract with their present team. Whilst Bosman himself was never able to benefit from the judicial ruling, it’s meant that players out of contract are able to move to other clubs on free transfers saving huge sums in transfer fees. With the influx of money from TV revenue’s into the game and the use of agents to represent players, this has resulted in players wages reaching numbers now way beyond what the average fan would earn in a lifetime and clubs of all shapes and sizes trying to compete beyond their means to survive. Whilst those at the top seem insulated in a bubble you only have to look to Pompey to see how things can go horribly wrong very quickly when it all goes wrong. Whilst we are now a club in transition and hopefully on the mend, the scars remain for local businesses, charities and the HMRC who lost out on monies owed to them whilst the players who are owed money will receive every penny owed to them. It’s no wonder people question whether not just the game of football but the world itself has gone officially mad. Whilst we as a club have been able to continue and start again, those owed money haven’t been so lucky. The only thing that set our business apart is the fact we’re a football club supported by thousands. The football club is the heart beat of the city. If you turn the heart beat out then what happens? We only have to look to Plymouth Argyle at present and their situation financially to be reminded of how the threat of demise affects their loyal fans. There’s 124 years of history wrapped up in a football team, surely too much history to let go down the pan? Lower league football clubs are the new names on the endangered species list and surely it’s only a matter of time when football starts having its own big name Dodo’s.
So Jimmy Hill the man with the chin and a little known Belgian player by the name of Jean-Marc Bosman had both had huge impacts on the game. Where else should we be looking for major impacts that happened to change football from a game first and foremost to what it’s now recognised as, namely a huge business infrastructure where at the top it’s banked by billionaire owners? It used to be that to become a Chairman you had to have a few million to buy a club. Not now for the super-rich clubs. Now only billionaires need apply.
On the 20th of February 1992 the clubs of the Football League First Division which has been founded in 1888, took the decision to form a breakaway league which was to become known as the FA Premier League. The reason the decision was taken was to take advantage of a lucrative television rights deal. Now rebranded as the Premier League, the decision of the Chairmen back in 1992 has seen the league grow into the wold’s most watched league and commands revenues worth over a staggering £2 billion every year. The man that made all this possible was Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch – the founder and Chairman of News Corporation, the world’s second largest media conglomerate. In 1992 Murdoch’s fledgling satellite service BskyB secured the television rights to the newly formed FA Premier League in a deal that changed not only television forever but the game of football itself for ever.
The first deal secured by the Chairman of the newly founded league saw a deal struck for five seasons for a total of £304 million. When in 1997 – 98 the deal was re-negotiated, it was done for a shorter period of four seasons, but the price had risen to £670 million. The third contract saw a season removed again, but this time the cost had risen to £1,024 billion. In August 2006 the European Commission declared that exclusive rights shouldn’t be allowed for one just company to televise football and Setanta Sports was awarded rights to broadcast two out of every six matches available for broadcast. Together the combined deal between Sky and Setanta would be worth a total of £1.7 billion for the league. With things on the up what could possibly go wrong for anybody. Well I’ve mentioned what can go wrong with Pompey as an example. Let’s look at what can go wrong off the pitch.
Keeping up with the Jones is an expression used in all walks of life. You might feel the need to upgrade your car because your neighbour has, or a TV because your best friend has for example. It’s an affliction we all suffer from whether you realise it or not. On 23rd June 1009, Setanta realised that its own personal bid to keep up with their Jones – namely Sky, had come at a cost – too high a cost and the company was placed into administration. In their bid to compete with Sky, they’d found that they simply couldn’t match the dominance of Sky TV which offered much more as a television channel than simply broadcasting games from the EPL. When the Irish TV firm went into administration analysts concluded that the company had been losing £100 million a year. Just to break even, Setanta had to have an extra 700,000 subscribers to take their numbers up from 1.2 million to 1.9 million. That’s to break even remember, not to make a profit and having missed payments to a number or sporting organisations, the channel was taken off air in the UK and placed into administration as mentioned.
So football had claimed another victim in the name of Setanta. Seven years earlier football had claimed its first victim in a move which had disastrous consequences on lower league clubs outside of the top flight of English football. If Setanta’s bid to take on Sky had been risky and dangerous, then years before ITV’s decision to take them on had been an even more perilous decision to have made and on the 27th of March 2002, football league clubs and ITV both discovered to what affect it had been a deal doomed to failure from the start.
In a bid to compete with Sky, ITV Digital has put together a deal with the remaining 72 league clubs for their television rights worth £315 million. Unbelievably though the contract had never been signed between the two parties which when troubles inevitably started and subscriptions had failed to reach the required numbers to make it financially viable to continue with the service as in the case to follow with Setanta, ITV Digital tried to reach a compromise with the League and renegotiate the price. However the league refused to take a £130 million pay cut. This had far reaching consequences on lower league clubs who had budgeted for large incomes from the large television contract. On the 1st of May 2002 most subscription channels ceased broadcasting on ITV Digital. The lure and appeal of the watch players in the top league outweighed any appeal to watch those sides that made up the rest of the country’s 72 of the 92 professional teams.
The football league sued ITV digital’s parent companies Carlton and Granada claiming that the firms had breached their contract in failing to deliver the guaranteed income. As I mention though the contract hadn’t actually been signed. So why hadn’t it been signed? The deal to broadcast Nationwide League games was never signed because the two parent companies refused to concede the necessary guarantees. So when the league sued they didn’t have a legal leg to stand on because it had “failed to extract sufficient written guarantees.”
So the league tried elsewhere to recoup their monies. This time it went back to the courts and filed a negligence claim against its lawyers for failing to press for a written guarantee at the time of the deal with ITV Digital. Seeking damages of £150 million it was awarded just £4. Yes you read that right. £4 between 72 league clubs and that would be on a hierarchy basis depending on how high a league your club was in. So for the clubs who’d banked on the television money and invested in larger squads and awarded higher contracts, they now found themselves unable to fulfil the extra costs involved and here began the spiral which has resulted in clubs like Plymouth Argyle with their backs to the wall fighting for their very lives. It’s a gamble many clubs are still continuing to take in a bid to either stay in the top flight of the English game or to break into the magic 20 where the cost of staying in the league or remaining outside of it in the lower three leagues is huge.
There were other names to during the 50 year period that also warrant a mention in that time. The now Lord Sugar who as the then chairman of Tottenham Hotspur and owner of Amstrad had used his connections with BskyB to inform them that they should up their bid and blow ITV’s original bid out of the water for the television rights, something that they seized upon and the rest is history. It was a double win for Lord Sugar as the set boxes used to receive BskyB were made by his Amstrad Company. But the names of Hill, Bosman, Murdoch, Sky and ITV had the biggest impact.
Under the guidance of Michael Platini, UEFA are keen to avoid the European game imploding and are unveiling new regulations and penalties but this isn’t a wholesale change across the board. It will only affect those clubs who qualify for Europe. The football league has already brought in new regulations concerning turnover to spending ratio’s in the lower two tiers and from next season the clubs in the Championship will find themselves with more restrictions which can only be a good thing if the game is to self-regulate and sort out its financial mess. Whether a new buyer can be found in time to save Plymouth Argyle remains to be seen before football league at the very least begins to get it’s house it order finally. As a fan of football I hope that 124 years of history isn’t laid to rest because football forgot it was a game first, forgot about the fans and remained steadfast in its aim to be a business first and foremost.
Will regulations and sanctions work for UEFA though? Will sorting things out with the so called big clubs in England and around Europe and penalising them if they don’t meet new regulations? Will it bring balance down the leagues to help clubs like Plymouth? Step forward Real Madrid’s Florentino Perez who has openly been calling for a super league for years and the voices of Real Madrid have been heightened at the start of this month by the claims of ex Managing Director Jorge Valdano who has predicted that both Real and Barca will severe their La Liga links and throw their weight behind a European Super League.
If the top two clubs in Spain walk, they’ll be followed by the rest of the big clubs in Europe mark my words. And if the likes of Manchester United, Chelsea and Manchester City follow their lead it won’t be long before Murdoch either takes his money out of the English game totally, or he offers a vastly reduced price when the deal is next up for negotiation and if it happens the game will fall like a house of cards and it won’t just be Plymouth Argyle that are left sweating on their future.
The game needs to act and it needs to act now and remember first and foremost that without the fans, the game is nothing. When no one is left inside the ground then perhaps owners will have to listen more because Sky’s money comes from one source - The fans. When they stop watching, they stop paying and when the money dries up then it’ll go full circle.
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