The Club
How the Premier League Became the Richest, Most Disruptive Business in Sport
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Beschreibung des Verlags
An excellent recap, with wonderful access and forensic detail on the Premier League's rise to global alpha status... All told with an arch sense of humour The Guardian
How did English football - once known for its stale pies, bad book-keeping and hooligans - become a commercial powerhouse and the world's premium popular entertainment?
This was a business empire built in only twenty-five years on ambition, experimentation and gambler's luck. Lead by a motley cast of executives, Russian oligarchs, Arab Sheikhs, Asian Titans, American Tycoons, battle-hardened managers, ruthless agents and the Murdoch media - the Premier League has been carved up, rebranded and exported to phenomenal 185 countries. The United Nations only recognizes 193.
But the extraordinary profit of bringing England's ageing industrial towns to a compulsive global attention has come at a cost. Today, as players are sold for hundreds of millions and clubs are valued in the billions, local fans are being priced out - and the clubs' local identities are fading. The Premier League has become the classic business fable for our globalised world.
Drawing on dozens of exclusive and revelatory interviews from the Boardrooms - including Liverpool's John W. Henry, Tottenham's Daniel Levy, Martin Edwards and David Gill at Manchester United, Arsène Wenger and Stan Kroenke at Arsenal, Manchester City's sporting director Txiki Begiristain, and executives at Chelsea, West Ham, Leicester City and Aston Villa - this is the definitive bustand boom account of how the Premier League product took over the world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalists Robinson and Clegg, both of the Wall Street Journal, expertly explore the creation and expansion of the English Premier League, club soccer's preeminent sports organization, in this investigative chronicle of sports, business, and global culture. The league was formed in 1992 when England's top soccer teams broke with the country's football league, in which they had been "bound to every other club in the country by a four-tiered structure" since the 19th century. By creating their own top-tier league, team representatives capitalized on new revenue streams, including a 304 million TV contract from Rupert Murdoch's Sky TV. Enthralled by the intense competition and an influx of cash, billionaire owners from the U.S., Russia, and the Middle East bought up the likes of Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea, and Manchester City and began playing in state-of-the-art stadiums, selling merchandise internationally, and paying the world's best players exorbitant salaries. Using their investigative journalism skills and mixing facts into a solidly entertaining narrative that melds boom-and-bust business with athletic competition at the highest level, the authors perfectly capture the rise of one of the world's best-known sports organizations.
