How Ian Ayre wants to make the Premier League even less competitive

By Ian Winwood

Published 13:02 14/10/11

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Isn’t it funny that this week the most popular man in certain parts of Manchester is a representative of Liverpool Football Club?

On Wednesday Liverpool managing director Ian Eyre stated that when it comes to overseas broadcasting rights, each Premier League club should be free to negotiate their own television deal.

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His thinking is that a club such as the one he represents would be able to attract more income alone than shackled to the collective bargaining of the Premier League.

“The other European clubs just don’t follow that model,” he said. “They will create much greater revenue [for themselves, obviously] and go and buy the best players.”

Aha! So it’s this that has prevented Liverpool from ever winning the Premier League title – the rest of the Premier League!

Those bastards!

The logic is simple, that free from such dead weight as those peasants from Wigan and Wolves, Bolton and Blackburn, the glorious Liver Bird will be finally free to fly to the top of the sporting food chain.

There are a couple of flaws in Ian Eyre’s logic, though.

The first is that allowing clubs to negotiate their own international television rights will of course put Liverpool at an advantage over, say, Fulham or Queen’s Park Rangers. But it will also put them at a disadvantage when pitted against Manchester United, and possibly Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester City as well.

Individual rights will give them more money than the poorer teams, but nowhere near as much as the truly rich.

The second is a point of principle, not practice: a league is as only as strong not as its strongest member, but its weakest. The Premier League, like most football leagues, can obscure this fact by each season relegating the three poorest teams. But the question as to whether the EPL is as competitive as it might be is one to which only an idiot would answer, yes.

Since its inception, the English top division has seen four teams crowned as its champion. One of those was Blackburn Rovers, which is a bit like being struck by lightning when on your way to cash in a lottery ticket worth a hundred and one million pounds.

On the other side of the Atlantic, during the same period some 13 different teams can lay claim to being Super Bowl champions. Despite the fact that the National Football League is the dominant sport in only one country, it is the most profitable league in the world.

And how does it work? It works like socialism. Really there is no other word to describe it.

Not only are the television revenues split evenly, not only does each team spend exactly the same on players’ wages, but the redistribution even goes so far as to teams sharing the money from the merchandise they sell.

The result? That every franchise has an equal chance of winning – including the Green Bay Packers, who play in a town of fewer than 100,000 people – and that the league in which teams play is greater than the sum its parts.

This should be the ideal of a sporting set-up: where teams are measured only by what happens on the field, and never off of it. 

The Premier League’s foreign rights deal, which is currently worth £1.4 billion, expires in 2013.

For the present arrangement to be overturned, it requires the consent of 14 of the Premier League’s 20 clubs.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

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