Big money, big brands: How did we get to the football Super League?
The people’s game, once run by reactionary dinosaurs and funded by the sale of greasy meat pies and brown ale, is now at the mercy of an unholy alliance of relentless media billionaires, writes Chris Horrie
It is a common complaint these days that, like Sam Cooke, people don’t know much about history. But one thing most people do know for sure, thanks to the Abba song “Waterloo”, is that it always repeats itself. More than this, when history repeats itself, everyone knows, the first time it produces tragedy, and the second time, farce.
The tragedy-farce dichotomy seems to neatly describe the state of affairs in televised professional football in the UK at the moment. The vilified proposal to set up a breakaway European Super League so that the “Big Six” leading clubs, or “brands” as their owners now describe them, could monopolise income from pay TV is not new. Nor is the complaint that all the other clubs left behind in a rump league would be thrown to the wolves including, as it happens, Wolves.
Plans for a made-for-TV “super league” involving a small minority of the Football League’s original 92 affiliated clubs date back more than 60 years to the birth of ITV. The finances and internal politics of football and television have been interlinked ever since.
The first TV broadcast of anything at all in the UK took place in November 1936 and was witnessed by a tiny number of “lookers in”, as they were called, within range of the corporation’s transmitter in north London. The launch programme lasted for a few hours in the afternoon, interspersed with breaks so that the lookers in did not get “eye strain”. It consisted of a music hall singer warbling about how great television was going to be, followed by a man in a dinner jacket spinning plates on sticks. After the war things had moved on a bit, but not much. There were various puppet shows, “radio vision”-style news bulletins and a couple of dramas. And the spinning plates had been replaced by an endless loop of a man making a clay bowl on a potter’s wheel, which was shown for long periods on the grounds that there was nothing else to see.
And then came football.
Before the television age transformed the economics of the football industry, there was a natural rise and fall among a group of around 20 clubs, each of which had a run at the top with a good young team, before falling back down the league again, allowing another club to have its few years of glory. Clubs in London, the Midlands and the Manchester-Liverpool-Leeds corridor had always had slightly bigger crowds and a bit more money, but the gap between the richest of the 92 clubs affiliated to the Football League and the poorest was not great, and nothing like the vast gulf which now exists.
What locked Manchester United into its current position of dominance was the simple fact that United happened to be the top team at the moment television arrived. Had TV come in the 1920s the power centre of English football would have been Huddersfield or Sheffield; the 1930s or Forties would have given predominance to Arsenal or possibly Portsmouth. It was thus a tremendous stroke of luck for Manchester United’s manager Sir Matt Busby that his “Babes” team came into its own in 1955 and 1956 when ITV was being set up, awash with money from its monopoly of commercial television advertising revenue, and ready to pay large sums to fill up its yawning hours of airtime with football.
ITV was instrumental in setting up the European Cup competition which was the first entirely made-for-TV competition in professional club football. Games took place under floodlights in the evening, perfect for ITV’s midweek late evening schedules. At first the English football authorities discouraged participation in the European Cup, denouncing it as a gimmick. But Manchester United saw the value of the fame it would bring, as well as the performance money ITV was willing and able to pay.
It was often the case in pre-television football economics that a butcher or brewer would own or have an interest in the local football club
ITV next turned to domestic English league football with a proposal for a breakaway Super League (that was the actual title) of about a dozen clubs who would play each other in the evenings. Manchester United would be the main attraction with other clubs – large and small – representing a geographical spread around the country to make the project appealing to ITV’s national advertisers.
But ITV had reckoned without Bob Lord of Burnley, a wholesale meat supplier and monopoly provider of meat pies to Burnley Football Club. It was often the case in pre-television football economics that a butcher or brewer would own or have an interest in the local football club especially if, as was the case with Lord, he was a freemason with political connections. Meat is a perishable commodity and it made sense to gather 30,000 people into a freezing cold brick and concrete pen on Saturday lunchtime to clear the week’s stock in the form of meat pies of necessarily variable quality. Television money might well be a gravy train for some; but it was not the sort of gravy from which Lord and many others in charge of league football at the time had made their fortunes.
Lord hated television partly because he believed the medium to be under the control of “showbusiness Jews from London” as he put it, but mainly because he thought people would not come to watch football at Burnley’s Turf Moor stadium, and thereby buy a pie or two, if they could watch it at home. He therefore set out to torpedo the ITV breakaway before it could be launched.
Lord campaigned to have the leading clubs who were working with ITV – Manchester United, Arsenal, Newcastle, Spurs, Liverpool and Aston Villa – thrown out of the league and banned from the FA Cup. He called a meeting of all 92 clubs, ostentatiously held in the belly of the beast in Manchester, and in the one-club-one-vote system then in place secured a majority to throw the breakaway clubs out if they continued to talk to ITV.
The now familiar game of poker ensued. The big clubs considered going it alone outside the existing framework, but whereas the small clubs were of one mind and really had nothing to lose, the breakaway clubs began squabbling among themselves and the plan collapsed.
The BBC moved in to exploit the confusion, offering a smaller amount of cash for the right to show highlights of Saturday matches later in the evening on what was to become one of its most successful shows – Match of the Day. Importantly the money from the BBC was to be shared equally by all 92 affiliated league clubs as part of a pretence that the audience wanted to see an abstraction called Football League, rather than the reality that they wanted to watch Manchester United and the other glamour clubs.
Within a few years the super league project was revived and rebranded under the new and much less toxic title of the Premier League
With this small concession in place the first breakaway was a dead duck. Lord was triumphant. His influence was such that no English league football was televised live for 30 years. If the Big Six looked like they were trying to revive the breakaway plan, which they often did, Bob Lord would release his flying monkeys in the form of the smaller and more pie-dependent clubs to vote to have them thrown out of the football industry. Lord carved out an even more extreme position just for his own club. No Burnley games could be filmed even for Match of the Day for five years after the show was launched. When a BBC film crew overlooked this exemption by accident and turned up at Burnley’s stadium, Lord grabbed the paperwork they had brought with them, tore it up, threw it in their faces and booted them out of the ground.
The attitude towards TV was entirely different at Manchester United where the manager, Sir Matt Busby, had seen the value of television exposure. His team featured George Best, the first real TV star in a football shirt. People would tune in just to watch him. As league champions at the time when the BBC launched Match of the Day in 1964, United were more or less permanently installed as top of the bill on the new show.
And then in 1968 – a turning point. United became the first English team to win the European Cup. All the matches in their European campaign were broadcast in full on ITV, since the European Cup competition belonged to the European football authorities, and not the Football Association or the Football League, and was therefore beyond the clutches of Bod Lord. Live coverage of the final drew a huge audience all over the UK and throughout the world.
And yet the modest sums paid by the BBC for Match of the Day went to the league as a whole to be paid out in more or less equal shares to all 92 clubs. BBC executives meanwhile openly gloated that they had the football industry over a barrel. If United and the big clubs tried to hold out for better terms from TV, the smaller clubs would panic and vote to accept whatever was put on the table on the grounds that it was better than nothing.
Things only began to change after the launch of satellite pay television in the UK in 1988 in the form of British Satellite Broadcasting, the precursor of Sky TV. BSB offered around £50m a year, 50 times what the BBC was paying for highlights, for the right to show matches live. But the offer collapsed in the usual byzantine politicking on the league management committee. Manchester United and the others had once again seen millions from television screening rights slip through their fingers.
BSB’s offer sparked the smouldering resentments between the Big Six clubs and the rest of football into open warfare. Manchester United lined up with its old allies in ITV to plan a new breakaway super league to be called The ITV Ten and designed by Greg Dyke, later director general of the BBC but at the time a senior ITV executive. The ITV league would consist of the Big Six plus four other teams included to provide national coverage, since the Big Six represented only London and the northwest. ITV Ten matches would be live and free-to-air and the broadcaster would match BSB’s offer of around £50m – fully 10 per cent of ITV’s entire programme budget. The money would be shared by 10 clubs and not all 92 league clubs, each would get 10 times as much money. The other 82 clubs would get nothing at all and many might go to the wall as a result. That was fine by Martin Edwards, the owner of Manchester United, who regarded them as parasites and freeloaders who ought to be “put to sleep”.
The 1988 ITV version of a super league was denounced as furiously as last month’s European Super League idea and in very much the same terms. And it collapsed for the same reasons as well – the rest of the football industry rallied and threatened them with expulsion, while the Big Six clubs schemed and fought against each other like so many fat cats in a bag. A compromised was reached whereby ITV still paid the £50m but the structure of the League would not change. For four glorious seasons football fans were able to watch their teams free-to-air on a weekly basis, and more money flowed into professional football at all levels. It appeared that everyone had been a winner.
But this was not enough for the Big Six, especially Manchester United, which had floated on the stock market and needed to show greatly increased potential income from TV rights in order to support the share price. A serious leap forward in TV money could only come from a satellite pay TV operator.
Within a few years the super league project was revived and rebranded under the new and much less toxic title of the Premier League. The genius political stroke was to use the FA, the senior and more establishment-minded regulatory body which ran the England national team and the FA Cup, as the framework for the breakaway.
The Big Six were persuaded to open up the proposed Premier League to all 22 clubs in what was then Football League Division One. If the league clubs voted to ban promotion and relegation to the breakaway “Premier League” clubs they would be cutting off their noses to spite their faces, since a majority of them would have a reasonable chance of one day being promoted into the league, and the golden circle of pay TV money.
The Premier League was launched in 1992 and the rest, as they say, is history. Rupert Murdoch’s Sky TV bought the rights to the Premier League, a deal made possible only with the connivance of the BBC. The Big Six liked the pay TV money Sky was able to put on the table. But at that point they also needed the millions of “free-to-air” viewers provided by the BBC in order to sell shirt sponsorship and pitch-side advertising. The audience for Sky was tiny, and the company was effectively bankrupt and was threatening to drag down the entire Murdoch empire. So Sky offered to give the BBC highlights clips from its coverage. In this way the corporation could continue to broadcast the Big Six on Match of the Day, to keep their advertisers happy. The skulduggery by which Sky obtained and kept exclusive pay TV rights to the “FA Premier League” and at the same time skirt around anti-monopoly legislation was impressive and – to borrow Sky’s own logline for the “Premiership’ – “a whole new ball game”.
Manchester United were completely dominant in the first two decades of the Premiership, winning the competition in six of the first 10 seasons, finishing second three times and coming third only once. International resales of the Premier League to cable TV systems around the world – and especially in China – made the Manchester United a global “brand” to rival Coca Cola. The team had celebrities such as David Beckham, who became a brand in his own right. Income from TV rights, sponsorship, shirt sales and even a chain of branded “Red Café” junk food restaurants in Southeast Asia now greatly outstripped receipts at the ground for tickets sold to fans. Sky had turned Manchester United and its celebrity players into such hot properties that the club began to act as though Manchester United was synonymous with the Premiership, at least when looked at as a TV show.
Murdoch himself had proposed a European Super League of his own in 2000 after the failure of his United takeover bid, and the idea never really goes away
The board of Manchester United were certainly thinking along these lines – breakaway stage two linking up with big European football brands like Real Madrid – and were in talks with a consortium of European cable channels to launch a “European Super League” which would do to Sky what Sky had once done to ITV and the BBC.
If United (and perhaps one or two other Big Six clubs) did leave the Premier League to join the proposed European Super League, the clubs would become even more profitable, but the Premiership – the cornerstone of Murdoch’s finances – would be destroyed. The Premier League had become a license to print money and profits from Sky was funding his expansion in the USA with a range of investments including the launch of Fox News.
In 1997 Murdoch launched a takeover bid for Manchester United itself to remove any threat to Sky. Ownership of United, along with the substantial shareholding Sky had built up in all the Big Six, would make sure United remained locked in the golden chains of the Premiership forever. The takeover was one of the mostly bitterly fought and political boardroom battles of recent years, and gave rise to a noisy “fan power” movement on the part of United supporters who had at last woken up to the fact that their club had been transformed into a television show in which they were charged for the privilege of playing the role of a grateful, polite and obedient TV studio audience.
Murdoch however suffered a rare defeat at the hands of anti-monopoly regulators and clever manoeuvring by his old rival Greg Dyke, who had now left ITV and was on the board of Manchester United, handling rights negotiations and helping to develop its exclusive MUTV channel as a sideline or maybe a distribution for the club’s own pay-per-view operation one day. The Murdoch bid had the secondary effect of putting Manchester United into play in terms of ownership, resulting in the eventual purchase of the club by the Glazer family in 2005, sparking the start of the green-and-yellow protest movement and the launch of FC United of Manchester a co-operatively owned relaunched version of the club as a way of keeping the protest alive and in the headlines from week to week.
The revelation that the Glazers had been key players in the revived European Super League plan was no surprise. Murdoch himself had proposed a European Super League of his own in 2000 after the failure of his United takeover bid, and the idea never really goes away. There is an inevitability about the scheme because it would be very likely to work in commercial terms, given the growth of world population and the spread of digital channels desperate for something bland enough to show anywhere in the world. It is one of the few television products which is acceptable to the censors in even the most authoritarian of countries from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. A pirated Premier League show is even shown on North Korean state television.
Read More:
Football used to be run by reactionary dinosaurs and funded by the sale of greasy meat pies and brown ale. Now it is run by an unholy alliance of relentless media billionaires and funded by pay TV subscriptions in partnership with McDonald’s and Coca Cola.
Who is to say which arrangement is the more unsavoury?
Chris Horrie is author of ‘Premiership – Lifting the Lid on a National Obsession’, published by Simon and Schuster
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments