Last week, the Premier League announced a $2.7bn (£2.3bn), six-year American TV deal with Comcast NBC, a sum that will push the league’s annual turnover above £6bn and marks the moment at which income from foreign media rights income exceeds domestic income. It is a fitting marker for the league’s 30th season and its three decades of hyper-globalisation. First, the Premier League’s global TV audience outstripped domestic viewership. Then the entirely foreign XI fielded by Chelsea in 1999 announced the globalisation of the league’s labour market; foreign players now make up around three-quarters of the club’s squads. Foreign coaches, once entirely absent, are now in the majority, as are foreign owners, who hold majority stakes in 16 out of the 20 clubs.
The league has benefited from an income-sharing model among the clubs that ensures, if not widespread competition for the top spots, a fiercely competitive league on a game by game basis, as it has from astute marketing, world-class broadcasting and the value of English as a global language. But it is economic globalisation itself that has been the main driver, generating an upward spiral of growth. Over the past 30 years, seemingly impervious to the global financial crisis, austerity and Brexit, the league’s annual turnover has soared by an astronomical 2,900%.
However, if globalisation has been the mainspring of the league’s growth, it has always relied on English clubs’ local narratives and identities to frame it and the energy and culture of the English crowd to animate it. A big part of the league’s televisual appeal appears to rest on the intensity of supporters and the relentless attacking football this encourages and this despite huge increase in ticket prices, a rapidly ageing audience and the deadening effect of ever more corporate stadiums.
These are all particularly English stories. As the past 30 years have seen a widespread sell-off of communal assets to foreign states, so too in football. The wild inflation of the housing market by the global super-rich is matched by the escalating and implausible prices paid for football clubs. With the unstoppable growth of a globalised finance sector that pays a small number of people huge salaries while becoming increasingly disengaged from the rest of the domestic economy, the Premier League is an even sharper analogy of the British economy; the lower leagues find themselves falling further and further behind, with club owners risking ever more debt in a gamble to join the charmed circle.
Not that they will actually make any money out of the Premier League, where most clubs continue to rack up losses. But profit is not really the purpose of the exercise. Mohamed Al Fayed did not buy Fulham and Harrods because of their rates of return, but to use as tools in his long battle to gain British citizenship and an entree into its elite. Roman Abramovich lost £1.5bn laundering his own reputation and managing his escape from Putin’s Russia. Thaksin Shinawatra, the exiled Thai prime minister, bought Manchester City as a way of sending political messages back home. The ruling houses of the UAE and Saudi Arabia are certainly not counting on Manchester City and Newcastle United to bankroll their retirements, but are busy using them to burnish their global reputations.
In this too the Premier League is a very English story, for it is obvious that power, voice and influence can all be purchased by foreign individuals and corporations. Throw in the US billionaires, asset-strippers, hedge funds and assorted Czech, Chinese and Greek oligarchs who have bought stakes in clubs and we have a reasonable cross-section of the global elite that has made London its home. Look at the way that Manchester City has bullied the city’s council and Manchester United and Liverpool’s American owners tried to reform the Premier League to the benefit of the big clubs and you have a reasonable take on how business is now done here.
Yet, despite all of this, the Premier League, and English football in general, continues to offer glimpses of another England. Victory in the Women’s Euros was accompanied by a version of the English nation that was not only feminine but refreshingly bereft of references to the Second World War. Widespread fan protest over the creation of the European Super League last year demonstrated a deep resistance to the crass commercialisation of closed leagues and forced the government into a policy review of football governance. Support by the Premier League for Black Lives Matter and players who have chosen to take the knee has been among the most public and powerful statements of anti-racism in English civic life. Perhaps most remarkable of all, Marcus Rashford forced the government to change its mean-hearted school meals policy, while Fans Supporting Foodbanks, which collects donations at grounds on match days, has become one of the sector’s largest grassroots initiatives.
What story will the Premier League tell us this year? The needs of the World Cup, shifted from its usual summer slot to a more clement winter in Qatar, will see the league stop for six weeks in November and December, promising to disrupt the best-laid plans of every team. But more telling, I think, will be how an ever richer league looks alongside raging inflation, a precipitous decline in real wages, widespread fuel and food poverty and no doubt more extreme weather.
Given such extraordinary wealth, the league could be investing serious money in a carbon-zero transition, as some of its most environmentally minded clubs have begun to do; it could be cushioning the inevitable hardship faced by clubs lower down the ladder that will be crushed by rising energy prices; it could be supporting and funding the magnificent displays of compassion and solidarity of some of its fans and players. Or it might, given its insulation from English society and its economic misfortunes, choose, like the current government, to do nothing at all. That would be the most English story of all.
• David Goldblatt is the author of The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Football and The Game of Our Lives
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