Will the EPL ever become the GPL? A truly global league.
The English Premier League is one of the most widely followed sports leagues in the world. It is broadcast in 212 territories with a potential audience of 4.7 billion people. From this international broadcast deal, the Premier League earns £1.2bn each year – a figure that is set to increase with every new tender.
In England itself, discontentment with the beautiful game seems rife. With soaring ticket prices at every level, not to mention the cost of the staples of a Saturday afternoon; pies, pints and programmes further eating into fans’ pockets, many fans have become disillusioned. Foreign players dominate as the national team dwindles. Nevertheless, football is an industry, a commercial venture, and as the Premier League grows stronger and stronger, and rules the English sporting world, the British market seems to be saturated.
With this in mind, it makes perfect sense for the Premier League to be looking abroad in order to expand it’s business and further increase revenue. The relatively untapped football markets of the Far East, the Middle East, India and even North America offer boundless business opportunities if the EPL were to throw itself into virtually risk-free economic ventures. There is an appetite for football in these regions for which nobody has come to close to catering. How though can the Premier League attempt to conquer these countries aside from the laborious and swift pre-season marketing tours?
Richard Scudamore, Chief Executive of the EPL proposed in 2008, that clubs could play one additional league match overseas – the 39th game. After all, the National Football League has garnered incredible success from a similar model. There has been a regular season game played at Wembley Stadium since 2007, with two this year, and three next year. Scudamore said that the chairmen of all 20 clubs at the time supported the idea, and more recently Shahid Khan, owner of the Jacksonville Jaguars and Fulham FC expressed his support in an interview with the Daily Telegraph, ‘I thought it was a very, very ingenious plan that he [Scudamore] had.’ Although Khan admitted he did not envisage it happening any time soon, ‘I think there will be a time but it’s not right now…and eventually it would make sense but it has to make sense to everybody.’ With money the driving force in football now, it seems as though many of the decision-makers within the game would be in favour of the move.
It is however, extremely unlikely that playing a match away from the fans that have given their lives and their savings to their cherished clubs will ever make sense to everybody. There is a distinct difference between the NFL and EPL. First and foremost, the NFL is seen as a business with the fans coming second. In addition, the language surrounding the league is more businesslike, with the sports media apportioning equal importance to the front office as to the actual team. This is not the case in English football. In fact, there is discernible mistrust from fans regarding the fully evolved nature of football – a business. To fans of football in it’s homeland, that is not what football should ever be about – it should be about passion, about glory, and about the fans that come to support the club – both with their wallets and their voices. Moreover, playing for the national team used to be seen as the ultimate aim of a player’s career, but even that has lost it’s edge as the performances of England become less and less inspiring. The effects of this have been felt recently in the mass calls for change surrounding the national team setup. Yet the answer for this problem was just to throw money at a brand new, state-of-the-art national football centre, another commercial venture. The reality is that English football fans are becoming more and more like American football fans, being priced out of the sport they helped grow, being forgotten as their favourite players transferred or released, and being used, as the price of being a fan exponentially increases.
What is more likely though is that Shahid Khan did not have the fans in mind when he talked about everyone understanding the proposal, for FIFA and Sepp Blatter were the main obstacles to Scudamore’s idea. Although Blatter did not really say why he was against the 39th game, it was probably another example of his crusade against English arrogance in the football world – why should it be the English Premier League that establishes itself globally? Well why shouldn’t it? The global expansion of domestic leagues would purely be a financial move designed for a massive income boost. For the English Premier League, which originated as a breakaway league set up in order to take advantage of an extremely lucrative broadcast deal, this would be a natural progression, and quite frankly it is surely only a matter of time until we see a Merseyside derby in Abu Dhabi.
Some may point to the fact that football is already a global game, as there are domestic leagues in over 200 countries worldwide, each with avid fan bases and their own traditions. Yet football has changed, the superpowers will only grow and expand whether this happens in the next five or twenty years. When the governing body of the sport can boast the same economic power as a G8 nation, it is clear that money dominates, and the Premier League has every right to fight it’s way to the top and reach it’s full earning potential. Other leagues may follow suit and this could lead to an even more global game, one in which Manchester United v Barcelona could be an annual event and open to the highest bidder in the Global Premier League.
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