GREED
R' US
GREED
R' US
Founded in 1992 by clubs who wanted to steal everyone else's money, the Premiership has gone from strength to strength - or has it? Read its real history here.
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First signs of things to come
1965: BBC pays £5,000 for its Match of the Day highlights and each club received £54.35 as a result (£5000/92). This is because of Rule 34 of the FA Charter, which guarantees an even spread of funds between all professional clubs.
1986: Wimbledon reach the (old) First Division, less than a decade after being a non-league club. The idea that other non-league clubs might come up and thereby push established names down terrifies many top clubs.
1988: More money and greedier big clubs cause trouble, particularly after Wimbledon win the FA Cup Final. Threats from ‘the big five’: Manchester United, Liverpool, Tottenham Hotspur (honest!), Everton and Arsenal to form a breakaway ‘Super League’ lead to concessions being given by the smaller clubs with more money and voting rights given to bigger clubs. The gate levy is also reduced to 3% with home clubs now allowed to keep gate receipts - a big advantage to the larger clubs. The Big Five make a private deal with ITV to get themselves shown almost exclusively on TV. However there remains an element of redistribution: Division One receives 50%, Division Two 25%, and Divisions Three and Four 12.5% each.
1989 (15th April): The Hillsborough Disaster. A semi-final F.A. Cup clash between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest at Hillsborough results in 96 Liverpool supporters being crushed to death, largely due to the incompetence of South Yorkshire Police (naturally another police force clears them after a 'thorough investigation'). Lord Taylor’s report recommends that grounds should be made all-seater and proposes reducing pools tax, with savings passed onto the Football Trust who could then award grants. It also states rebuilding should not be an excuse by the clubs to raise ticket prices (which duly rocket), and that the League and FA both failed to regulate clubs effectively in terms of fulfilling safety duties. The government however only acted on the all-seater requirement and the giving of public money in the form of grants to fund the rebuilding of grounds. The new grant-funded stands were also used as an opportunity to install corporate boxes, as well as banqueting and conference facilities.
1991: The Football League publishes One Game, One Team, One Voice. It recommends that the FA and League should bury the differences that had grown between them, and become a single authority, a new 12 man board formed at The F.A. (in place of The F.A. Council) with six members from each organization, and the new F.A. would run the whole spectrum of football; amateur and professional, from top to bottom for the good of all. TV deals would be done for the whole of football, money distributed according to needs of running a healthy game. Rupert Murdoch’s struggling Sky TV made lucrative offers to the Big Five (who have no interest whatsoever in a healthy game), encouraging a breakaway. The FA, fearing for their own expense accounts, encourage the breakaway.
1991: The FA publishes Blueprint for the Future of Football. The report recommends the abolition of Rule 34, believed football should move upmarket to ‘chase more affluent middle class consumers', saw the F.A. as preeminent in football administration (surprise!), and backed big club proposals in the form of an 18-member Premier League tied to a system to promote excellence, that would ultimately lead to success for the England team. And to pigs flying.
1992: All 22 First Division clubs resign from Football League. This was against the F.A.’s proposals as a greater number of teams meant more games - detrimental to the national team and promotion of excellence. The F.A. could have forced the membership down to 18, but bottled out and instead reduced it only to 20. The new top flight clubs shared the £305 million bid by Sky between them, with the only concessions to the Football League being £3 million (under 1%) in compensation and allowing clubs to be promoted to and relegated from the Premiership. Clubs that were relegated would receive ‘parachute payments’.
1996: The Premiership makes a bad mistake. It tells the Football League it will only accept two club exchange in future. The FL (correctly, for once) sees this as a move by Premiership clubs to cut themselves off - and for once played things rather well. They threaten to stop all promotion and relegation. The Premiership's two brain cells finally meet and realize this would mean most clubs having nothing to play for for most of the season. The proposal is duly deposited in the circular filing cabinet.
2001: Six Division 1 clubs - Manchester City, Birmingham, Bradford, Coventry, Wolves and Sheffield Wednesday - propose a new Phoenix League, composed of 14 clubs from the existing Division One, plus Glasgow Rangers and Celtic. Nothing comes of these plans - yet.
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