The legendary Red Devils coach: The road to success

Chapter 222 The Premier League is coming

"The change of England's top league from League One to the Premier League is not a simple change of name, but a thorough reform and innovation of the model."

--Inscription

Under the impetus of the Big Five, a temporary alliance was formed. This interest-driven organization exerted tremendous power. In order to be safe and to get rid of the kidnapping, the English League One teams decided to sever ties with external organizations such as ITV, win the support of the English Football Association, and replace the League Organizing Committee to organize a new league.

The preparatory group suggested that the new league will be operated in a corporate manner, with each team jointly holding shares and setting up a Premier League company to be responsible for commercial operations. The Premier League company will vigorously develop commercial resources, focus on game quality and stadium safety, improve the management efficiency of the league, and build the league into an entertaining competitive program that deeply intervenes in the lives of fans.

The English Football Clubs mobilized together, and their lobbying ability was extremely strong. These wealthy tycoons started directly with the British government, then coordinated with the members of the Legislative Council, and then consulted with the English Football Association. Their plan for the new league was finally accepted smoothly and then quickly promoted.

In this way, starting from 1991, the preparatory group directly skipped the original league committee and began to prepare for the establishment of a new league.

The League Committee was horrified, but they could not block or oppose the new league. When the FA authorized them to organize and manage the league, they did not transfer the core power. In essence, they were just agents. When the FA agreed to organize the new league, the League Committee had no reason to intervene.

The English Football Association and the League Committee have long had conflicts, and the previous conflict of interests has already torn the two sides apart. The English Football Association believes that the distribution of interests in the new league is the best solution, so it decisively abandoned the middle layer of the League Committee and allowed the new league to move forward quickly. The five major clubs even made advance arrangements with some key personnel of the League Committee and invited them to work in the new league company. Who wouldn't be happy with such an arrangement?

There are also wise people in the English Football Association. They clearly realize that this is a commercial football era. The development of football requires financial support and resource investment, and needs to face more competition. The fierce competition between leagues of various countries has reached a fever pitch. If British football does not move forward, it will fall behind. There is no time and capital for hesitation.

On July 1991, 7, the "EPL Founding Agreement" was officially released. The 17 clubs of English First Division and the English Football Association signed the agreement, laying the foundation for the establishment of the Premier League. The agreement stipulates that the English Premier League will be newly established, and the league will be hosted by the newly established league company. The league company is a market institution with a commercial entity, invested and established by the 22 clubs of English First Division. This league company is completely financially independent and also separated from the English Football Association. The Premier League has completely separated from the original four-level league system in England. The new Premier League company has 22 clubs participating, and the independently operated league company has the rights of independent business development, sponsorship negotiations, broadcasting rights bidding, etc. The Premier League's television broadcasting rights no longer belong to the English Football Association or the League Committee, but are one of the rights and interests controlled by the Premier League itself. The Premier League Company and the English Football Association have entered into a profit sharing agreement, agreeing to pay funds to the English Football Association at a fixed amount plus a floating amount each year to support the development of other levels of leagues, community football, school football and other football undertakings.

The Premier League Company has innovated its management model. The league stakeholders are all the clubs that join the Premier League, which fluctuates with relegation and promotion each season. Each Premier League club is a shareholder of the league, voting to produce the Premier League board, appointing the CEO and forming a team to operate the league. The FA does not own shares in the Premier League Company, but they have special voting rights in electing the Premier League CEO and formulating new rules applicable to the league, and they also retain the right to select referees and the final punishment. This arrangement ensures a certain balance between the commercialization, marketization and football matches of the Premier League Company.

On May 1992, 5, the Premier League Company was officially established and announced that the new Premier League season would start in August 27. From 1992 to now, the reform of English football has gone through ten years of hard work and has finally been successfully completed.

The birth of the Premier League is a major historical event in English football and a major reform in football history.

The birth of a new league is most critical to the trial of a new business model. According to the agreement, the Premier League has to pay high fees to the FA and let the clubs get more income, which makes the operation extremely challenging, but the Premier League companies are extremely smart and they use genius business thinking to promote the development of football.

The Premier League has made many attempts, some of which have not been successful. For example, their attempt to sell the league's naming rights has encountered setbacks. In the first season, no company was willing to sponsor the league, but in the second season, the market began to warm up. Carling spent 3 million pounds over three years, setting a new record for English sports sponsorship.

In addition to title sponsorship, the Premier League’s biggest innovation is to turn football matches into a combination of competition and entertainment, packaging the intense competition into a “reality show”.

Competition is no longer a sport, but entertainment. The Premier League is determined to create gimmicks through live TV broadcasts, create stars and topics with commercial elements, create suspense and conflicts, and package the league into a large-scale program with impact, and even borrow and introduce elements of large-scale shows. Let fans realize that the game is a carnival for all ages, rather than a dangerous gathering dominated by hooligans and gangsters. Fans participating in the game is to find happiness in entertainment programs.

It was this revolutionary change in concept that made English football a leap forward. In the first season after the Premier League was officially established, the game was almost completely changed. Although the opponents remained the same, the intensity and excitement of the game could not have been greatly improved all of a sudden, and the rules had not changed much, but with the deep involvement of television broadcasts, the media hype, and the pursuit of celebrities by the society, the Premier League games began to become very popular and attracted the attention of the whole society.

Together with the clubs, the Premier League managers have made the Premier League run fast on the two roads of commercialization and internationalization. From the beginning, the Premier League managers have seized the most active, adventurous and radical part of the money torrent and pushed for television broadcasting. The Premier League has beautifully packaged the upcoming league, packaged the television broadcasting rights for five seasons and put them on auction. When the news came out, all the TV stations in England attached great importance to it, fearing that they would be expelled from the game because of too low an offer.

The Premier League was very bold and auctioned the broadcasting rights through an open bidding method. The final result was beyond everyone's expectations. Sky Broadcasting bid nearly 3 million pounds and won the bid, directly crushing traditional media such as the BBC. Even the Premier League did not expect this result at all. ITV, which participated in the preparation of the Premier League, was also swept out. The auction resulted in huge revenues, and Sky Broadcasting's madness became known. Media tycoon Murdoch, a big boss from Australia, was fully committed to opening up a new media field. His Sky Broadcasting was the first to realize the business opportunity and specially established Sky Sports Company for this purpose, setting up a separate football channel for broadcasting.

Starting from the Premier League, fans have entered the paid era of watching live football matches, and free has become history.

Sky Sports has developed multiple broadcast packages and licensed them to local broadcasters in England for a fee, further expanding the paid viewing experience. In order to watch the live broadcast of England's top league every week, English fans must pay to buy it. From free to paid, English football has completely changed its previous attributes of a public product and has turned to commercialization.

In this way, the Premier League, as the most elite top football match, officially changed from a free resource similar to a social public product to a commercial paid entertainment program. This is a program that is broadcast continuously every year, with up to 389 games in the whole season. After Sky's vigorous marketing and promotion, football matches have gradually become a super commodity to attract fans, and pay TV has become a member of the mainstream media. Sky TV has ushered in a peak of development because of broadcasting the Premier League. It has made a lot of money through broadcasting the Premier League and has grown into the flagship of the Murdoch empire.

The huge surge in TV broadcasting fees also brought more profits to Premier League teams. The Premier League continued to sell broadcasting rights through auctions. Sky TV also continued to increase its investment and continued to monopolize Premier League broadcasting. Sky's determination to win can be seen from its bids. After 1997, Sky TV's purchase of broadcasting rights increased from 6.7 million pounds (4 years) to 11 billion pounds (3 years) to 11.5 billion pounds (3 years), and the latest was 13 billion pounds (3 years). Such prices discouraged competitors.

In 2005, the European Union enacted antitrust laws to prohibit a single TV station from monopolizing the entire European broadcasting market. Influenced by this, the Premier League broadcast was split into six packages starting in 2007, and a media outlet was required not to monopolize more than five. As a result, Sky and Ireland's Setanta TV jointly bought all the broadcasting rights, setting a new record of 6 billion pounds in broadcasting fees. By 5, the English government banned the monopoly of broadcasting rights, and the Premier League broadcasting contract was split into six asset packages for auction. Sky still won four of them at the highest price, and the remaining two broadcast packages were obtained by other TV stations.

In addition to developing the local fan market, the Premier League broadcasting is also actively expanding overseas markets. Including local and overseas broadcasts, the price of the new three-year broadcasting contract of the Premier League starting in 2010 is as high as 3 billion pounds. By 34, when the Premier League bid for the broadcasting rights for the three seasons of 2015-2016, it raked in 2019 billion pounds in revenue, 81 billion pounds overseas and 30 billion pounds in the UK. This figure even exceeds the total TV broadcasting fees of the four major leagues of La Liga, Bundesliga, Serie A and Ligue 51. In November 2021, the Premier League announced the bidding results for the next broadcasting cycle (11-2022, a total of three seasons). Overseas broadcasting agencies spent 2025 billion pounds, while the UK maintained the level of 50 billion pounds. The record-breaking 50 billion once again refreshed people's cognition.

The huge amount of money injected also made the Premier League develop unprecedentedly. The Premier League implemented a completely different distribution method from before. 50% of the broadcasting income was divided equally among the 20 Premier League clubs, and the rest was allocated to the English Football Association for the construction of football infrastructure and youth football in lower-level leagues. With the big cake of TV broadcasting dividends, many Premier League clubs can fully afford the huge transactions and high wages in the transfer market, and still have profit margins. Take the Red Devils as an example. In the 2007/2008 season, they received 3500 million pounds from the broadcasting fees paid by Sky TV, and the pre-tax profit reached 7500 million pounds.

The Premier League has ushered in a new era. In terms of commercial value and market appeal, the Premier League has undoubtedly become the top international football league and an international brand that is popular all over the world, especially in Asia and North America. Compared with other major leagues, the Premier League's influence is second to none.

After the Premier League was launched, the income of each club also increased significantly. The broadcasting fee income of ordinary teams in the Premier League has exceeded that of most of the giants in the five major leagues.

The Premier League is undoubtedly one of England's most successful exports, with the league broadcast in 212 countries and regions around the world every year. According to a study by the sports consulting company Sport + Markt, 70% of global football fans watch the Premier League through different channels, and the Premier League has the largest audience among all football leagues in the world. In 2010, the number of viewers watching the Premier League on TV reached 47 billion, and 6.43 million households around the world watched the games on TV.

The English Football League entered a new era when League One became the Premier League.

There has been a huge change in the operation and management concepts of English football. The door to business has been opened wide, wealth has grown wildly, and the pie has been distributed more reasonably. Football is no longer just a game. The Premier League has transformed the game from a simple competition to a high-level competitive entertainment and visual feast, and has completely shifted to marketization.

After the success of the Premier League, the operation of lower-level leagues encountered great difficulties, but these leagues were inspired by the Premier League and also embarked on the road of reform. The second-tier league in England was restructured into the English Champions League - the English Championship, which is connected with the promotion and relegation of the Premier League and English League Two. The English Championship also found sponsors such as Coca-Cola to help, and its revenue even ranked among the top four in all professional leagues in Europe, higher than Serie A and Ligue 1. Subsequently, the third and fourth-tier leagues in England were renamed English League One and English League Two, respectively, and also implemented a development model in which sponsorship and television broadcasting were collectively divided according to performance and proportion.

The reform of the English Football League has even extended to the fourth and fifth levels, and commercialization has developed to a deeper and broader stage.