The Club: How the English Premier League Became the Wildest, Richest, Most Disruptive Force in Sports

The rise of the English Premier League is a story about the sports world’s wildest gold rush. In the span of twenty-five years, the league’s twenty clubs have increased their combined value by 10,000 percent, from around $100 million in 1992 to $15 billion today.

But of all the things they learned from across the pond, one lesson stood out. If they were ever going to make any money from owning a soccer club, it was going to come from television.

This business, ultimately, embodied the challenges of globalization, of the push and pull between expansion and identity, about the universalization of a product that is steeped in decidedly nonuniversal customs.

“We’re not a football club, we’re actually a sports entertainment media company,” Cook said internally as the new owners swept into City. “So we must create content. We must provide events, we must create shows, we must create drama. And we must be part of the news, front page and back page, in every way. Am I competing with the other football club down the road, Manchester United, or am I competing with Walt Disney, with Amazon?”

If there’s one thing that differentiates English soccer teams from American sports franchises, it’s their immovability. Football clubs do not budge.

“That was an eye-opener,” Dein said. “I understood that was how a sport should be run. The way they marketed it—it was more than ninety minutes of football, it was an event. This was a family sport, good outlets, you could get a decent meal. Even the toilets were good.”

“For me, there are five trophies every season: Premier League, Champions League, the third is to qualify for the Champions League,” Wenger told Arsenal’s shareholders years later. “The fourth is the FA Cup and then the League Cup.”

During the next two hours, the clubs in the room thrashed out the newest terms of their most valuable source of income: the Premier League’s television broadcast rights, which were heading to auction in three months’ time.

In the decade before 1992, as the Premier League’s new wave sought to upend English soccer and transform a game rooted in amateurism into an entertainment product for the twenty-first century, the NFL served as a kind of business case study for Dein, Scholar, and Edwards.

They pictured a modern, marketable, and media-friendly league, with safe, attractive stadiums fit for corporate hospitality that would harness the power of television and transform their teams into billion-dollar businesses.