By the current reckoning, eight English teams sit among the 20 highest earning clubs in world football.
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Premier League sides may well be struggling to hold their own against their continental counterparts on the pitch but financially they continue to enjoy huge advantages. In February broadcasting giants Sky paid just over £5 billion – a 71 per cent increase on the last record-busting contract – for a new three-year deal which will kick in from 2016.
The result, according to Deloitte, is that Newcastle United and even Everton are now counted among the planet’s 20 wealthiest teams.
One of England’s most historic clubs, Everton’s inclusion on that list is particularly telling given they are generally regarded as the paupers of the old order. They helped create the Premier League in 1992, but have experienced hard times ever since.
So to see them record comparable revenues to those of La Liga winners and Champions League runners-up Atletico Madrid is testament to the power of the brand they helped pioneer.
Indeed, Sir Philip Carter, the 1980s business leader and now Life President at Goodison Park, was one of a famous ‘gang of five’ who plotted a revolution that would forever change the complexion of English football.
The Top 20 Teams in the Premier League since 1992. #PremierLeague #BPL #Football pic.twitter.com/dqEIpD1DfW
— MM (@DJMightyMike) April 4, 2015
Yet he recalls that amid a grim era of recession, hooliganism, dwindling attendances and a European club ban, nobody had any clue of the rapid growth ahead – nor that subscription-based television would become the Premier League’s lifeblood.
“Looking back now, it grew faster, so much faster than you would expect in a situation like that,” said Carter, reflecting on the intervening decades.
“The way in which TV money would eventually come to fund football was not realised or understood back then. I don’t think anyone really anticipated how it would grow and grow and grow.”
Satellite television was indeed the fertiliser, helping English football’s top flight flourish into a global force, a magnet for sponsorship, a vehicle for commercial bounty, reinvigorated by uber-capitalism and viewed with envy by the international sporting fraternity.
On the pitch this growth manifested in an exotic array of the world’s leading players an heightened standards of athleticism. This picture is practically unrecognisable from the murky prelude to the Premier League epiphany.
The first half of the 1980s witnessed the modern game’s nadir. A crippling recession left clubs and supporters alike starved of cash, stadia was decaying and the malevolent presence of hooligans was a deterrent – declining gates becoming a worrying trend.
The 1985 Bradford fire was symptomatic of the game’s maladies and when the Heysel disaster occurred – less than three weeks after 56 people had lost their lives at Valley Parade – English clubs found themselves banned from European competition and confronted with some startling home truths.
And it was those malignancies that led Carter, then the Everton chairman, into a series of clandestine meetings with four other footballing powerbrokers – Liverpool’s Noel White, Irving Scholar of Tottenham Hotspur, Arsenal’s David Dein and Manchester United’s Martin Edwards.
“If you go back to the early 1980s there were great difficulties in football,” explained Carter. “There was obviously a recession going on and hooliganism was rearing its ugly head – there were real problems as far as the supporters were concerned.
“I think there was a five-year period in the early ‘80s where average attendances went down everywhere and that was really not good. At that stage we five came together and said something really had to be done.
“If you look back now we became a bit threatening, sort of saying we might break away. We didn’t mean we five would break away but we hoped we might stimulate the rest to do something about it and from then it sort of clicked into gear.”
Then came Hillsborough and the Taylor Report, the ramifications of which – allied with the growing support among the top clubs for a breakaway – ushered in a period of unprecedented change.
Since the English Premier League was established in 1992, Manchester United has the Most League Titles with 13. All under Sir Alex Ferguson
— Sport Facts (@sportfactzhere) April 5, 2015
“Our main concern was that we put football right – it was about what was going on,” added Carter. “How do we get the gates back? How do we get TV to help us? These things were very important.
“We started with the five but soon more clubs became interested and another four or five got involved and then it was the First Division basically. This wasn’t behind closed doors by this stage. We started off with the five of us operating separately but once we brought in the First Division obviously everyone knew about it.”
Soon Sky television would change everything, but at first nobody – including Carter – was convinced the answer was in subscription-based TV.
“I can remember an early discussion we had with them,” he said. “We were invited to sit down in London with the people who were in charge of developing satellite television and, while we were very impressed with it all, we didn’t see it as making all the difference.
“It was another element in the picture alongside the BBC and ITV, but eventually it became what it was all about.”
On February 20, 1992, the First Division clubs resigned from the Football League en masse.
Three months later the Premier League was formed and the signing of a maiden TV deal with Sky altered the landscape permanently.
“I think in the early days of the Premier Division, Sky were, perhaps, quite frantic and wondered who was going to buy satellite dishes and for what reasons,” he continued. “But it was not for shopping or the odd TV programme – it was for football – and we had a common interest there. Football provided this product for the TV companies and allowed them to develop it.
“If you go back to the coverage before then, if the game started at 3pm then TV started at 3pm, and if it ended at 4:45pm then TV ended at 4:45pm.
“Then suddenly Sky came along and said we will have an hour before and an hour afterwards and that transformed it – people who before were not interested in football became interested in the chat.”
That subsequent boom has also brought huge cultural differences – not least the influx of foreign players and heightened standards of professionalism, dietary discipline and training regimes. Again, that was something quite unforeseen, and Carter believes it was key to success in international markets.
He said: “The clubs we had and the type of football that was being played started to attract the foreign players over. And if you remember the really early days then the three or four we had, everyone watched them and admired them and that gradually developed and in itself was part of the picture that was being sent out to the public.
“As well as our own players and the players from the home nations, we had these foreign players who brought something to the game and it wasn’t just on the field; they brought things off the pitch in terms of training and diet and so on.
“I think that also brought a foreign TV audience. I remember early on the idea of the foreign transmission was fairly remote. You would get the odd country that would be willing to pay something – I think at one stage you had only two or three countries willing to pay anything at all.
“Yet as the foreign players came in this stimulated the desire to see what was going on and thank goodness ending up where we are today.”
