Sugared To Begin With, The EPL Has Not Always Been Sweet

The television companies have gained a throttle hold on the English Premier League, obliging matches played on Saturdays to be also played on Sundays, Mondays and now even Fridays. All that TV money hasn’t prevented steep rises in the cost of watching for spectators. Once a working class game, Premiership football today is very much for the well heeled. Has the game improved proportionately? PLAYERS ARE FASTER and fitter now, but the recent record of English clubs in the European Champions Cup has been dismally mediocre. As the old adage says, money isn’t everything; even when there is so much of it around, writes Brian Glanville.

- Brian Glanville

The so called Premier League is now 25 years old. When it was born, I christened it the Greed Is Good League and have never had any incentive to retract that nomenclature. The very circumstances of its birth were sombrely indicative. A meeting of the clubs which would constitute it was being held at the then headquarters of the Football Association at Lancaster Gate in West London.

A PRICE HAD BEEN AGREED to put to the aspirant television companies, who were terrestrial. Hearing it, the then owner of Tottenham Hotspur, Alan Sugar, very much a self made East London millionaire, sprang out of his seat, rushed out of the room to a telephone, from which he called the satellite group Sky television to allow them to trump that amount. This they did, which was you might say commercially the making of Sky and the beginning of previously inconceivable wealth for the footballers who would play in it. A situation compounded when, on December 15 1995, the European Court of Justice ruling on the appeal of the then 26-year-old Liege player Jean-Marc Bosman, decreed that clubs had no right to a transfer fee at the end of a player’s contract. It had taken five stressful and courageous years for Bosman to go through the various courts before his ultimate triumph. Not that he would receive much if any thanks for it from the players he would so sensationally enrich. It was in 1990 that Bosman wanted to leave Liege in Belgium for Dunkirk in France but Dunkirk were not willing to pay the half-million pound transfer fee and there was a deadlock.