How English football got rich

The Club. By Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 368 pages; $28. John Murray; £20.

DAVID DEIN, the former vice-chairman of Arsenal Football Club, was obsessed with toilets. In the 1980s the loos at English football grounds were vile and few, so supporters often resorted to using sinks or walls instead. The squalor embodied all that was wrong with the game. At American sports events, Mr Dein saw fans treated like paying customers rather than cattle. The atmosphere was congenial to families. The toilets were superior.

A belief that English football could become a far more appealing and hygienic product—and a more lucrative one—animated Mr Dein’s plans for radical change. As Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg of the Wall Street Journal relate in “The Club”, Mr Dein and his associates thought they needed to mimic the promotion of American sports. Arsenal and other leading clubs duly launched the Premier League, which broke away from the existing competitions in 1992. They studied the NFLexhaustively and pillaged its best ideas. “Monday Night Football” was lifted word-for-word. Even if some innovations flopped—cheerleaders were quietly scrapped—the new league heralded an age of transformation in English football.

The late 1980s had been marked by ugliness and neglect—tragically in the cases of a fire in Bradford in 1985 and the deadly crush at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield in 1989. The game had become a national embarrassment, but it was transformed into one of Britain’s most successful exports. Its broadcasting rights are now worth £2.8bn ($3.5bn) a year, making it comfortably the richest football league in the world. The combined revenue of its clubs has increased by over 2,500%.

Through interviews and astute analysis, the authors make it clear that the Premier League got lucky. Its arrival coincided with 15 years of strong economic growth, plus a boom in pay TV. The English language made it more accessible to global audiences than Italy’s Serie A, previously considered the top contest. But it also benefited from shrewd management. Richard Scudamore, the league’s longtime boss, emails personal thank-yous to all 80 broadcasters after each season. In a classic example of unintended consequences, a clause in the founding document was instrumental too. All money from overseas broadcasting (negligible in the early years) was divided equally between teams. That ensured a greater degree of competition than elsewhere, enabling Leicester City to win a fairytale title in 2016.

Eschewing the day-to-day dramas of managerial sackings and player transfers, the authors unpick how the league became a “global sports business, and entertainment behemoth”. There are some intriguing nuggets in this forensic and impeccably sourced account. Roman Abramovich would rather have bought Arsenal than Chelsea—but was wrongly told the club was not for sale. For all its razzmatazz, the Premier League still has only one-tenth as many staff as the NBA or NFL, a statistic that reflects the enduring power of the clubs.

Today the Premier League is not so much England’s football league as the world’s: its foreign broadcasting rights are now worth almost as much as the domestic ones. Such popularity surpasses anything Mr Dein could have dreamed of. The only danger, the authors warn, is that the wealthiest teams are endlessly pushing for even more cash and power; in 2018 they successfully ended equal distribution from overseas rights. The latest wrangling between the elite and those below them looks a lot like the manoeuvring that prefigured the Premier League’s formation.