The Premier League has undoubtedly developed into the world’s most prestigious football competition over the last few years, thanks to a winning combination of big-name players, well established and popular clubs, and the quality of football which is played in the league. This has turned football into one of the UK’s leading export industries and means that some of their biggest stars in the game can easily command bumper salaries of over £100,000 a week.
It wasn’t always this way, though, and the development of English football into a game which has come to dominate the entire world is something that looked far from certain even a few decades ago. In this entertaining article, we will take a look at how English football has developed, some of the current trends in the league and how the league has become an enormous, worldwide media juggernaut over the last few years.
The History of the Premier League
The Premier League was born out of a breakaway movement of clubs who decided to leave the old English Football League to set up a new competition which would actually allow them to keep hold of more of the money that they generated. This was a controversial move at the time as English football was heavily reliant on the larger clubs cross-subsidising smaller ones and the grassroots game in general. Nevertheless, the clubs pushed ahead with their move. They signed a multi-million-pound deal to sell coverage of their games to Sky, then a fledgeling satellite broadcaster which was best known for its ability to lose money hand over fist.
The money was welcome, however, as many English football clubs were playing in dilapidated stadiums which were far from fit for purpose and suffering from diminishing crowd sizes, as many of the biggest names in football left to play abroad. Some would say, however, that the move towards big-money football and the loss of community connections that this entailed, as clubs were increasingly snapped up by foreign sports firms and oligarchs, has been detrimental for the sport as a whole, particularly at the grassroots level where the players of tomorrow are found.
To the surprise of many, the decision to break away and team up with Sky was an enormous success and has set the template for the relationship between football, as well as sport in general, and the media which covers it in countries around the world. Sport has turned into box office content with many media companies making their money from the high subscriptions that sports fans have been willing to pay to follow their favourite players and clubs. As the Premier League has grown and the rights to cover it have led to increasingly large sums of money around the world, money has poured into the game.
This has been something of a mixed blessing for fans. While it has led to significant upgrades to the facilities and stadiums that games are played in, it has massively increased the level of demand for tickets, especially to the top of the league fixtures between the major clubs. Seeing a football match is now a must-do tourist experience for visitors to cities such as London and Manchester. This means that even reasonably basic seats can command prices of over £100 and the number of tickets available on match days to regular fans has been substantially reduced.
The Premier League Today
One of the most notable features of the Premier League today, compared to its past, and to the major football leagues in other countries, is how to open a competition it has become. While the path to victory taken by Leicester City a few years ago was an unusual occurrence, there are few other leagues around the world where five or six clubs have a genuine chance of finishing as champions at the end of the season. This is also a break from the state of the Premier League in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when Manchester United tended to dominate every season that they took part in, and rumours of ‘Fergie Time’ and other benefits that helped the team to maintain their dominance of the league were rife among the media and fans of other football clubs.
The league has made several changes in recent years in an attempt to engage fans in other countries and expand the reach of the game. Games that take place at 3 pm on a Saturday are still unavailable on television in the UK in an attempt to protect the gate revenue of the smaller clubs who often play at this time. Marquee fixtures, however, are increasingly being played earlier in the day or in the evenings during the week, partly in an attempt to take advantage of the larger television audiences that are available at this time.
The Role of Television
There is little doubt that Premier League football is now aimed first and foremost at the audience who are watching at home on TV and that fans in the stadium itself are a secondary consideration. This can be seen through the increasing number of games which kick off around midday. This is a time that makes it near impossible for fans to travel all the way across England on public transport to attend a game. On the other hand, it does allow the game to be shown live to a prime time audience in the Far East, a significant market for the Premier League.
This is just one example of the way that television has reshaped the Premier League and the game of football in general over the last few years. Television has also offered a new lease of life for some of the biggest stars of the past. Players now regularly pop up on Match of the Day and Sky Sports to offer their opinion on the game. The same shift has also been seen in the world of football commentary, a role that is now mainly filled by former players, rather than the generalist commentators who would have taken their place behind the microphone a generation ago.
There is a group of fans who believe that this increasing catering for television has reduced the quality of the game for fans in the stadium. As the size of stadiums and the amount of television infrastructure required have increased, fans find themselves sat further and further away from the action. Others believe that the requirement for all-seater stadium sport has also changed the atmosphere of the game negatively.
The Premier League has secured a position in global sport which is unmatched by any other professional league, even the American sports leagues that once looked set to achieve dominance. This has been very good for the reputation of UK sport around the world. Still, there are some fans back in the country who would claim that the one person who has lost from this massive enrichment is the fan who turns up at a stadium at 3 o’clock on a Saturday afternoon to watch a game of football. It is little surprise that this person is now far more likely to be found on their sofa at home than screaming from a terrace.