How England’s football league is breaking the sport

on February 3rd 2023 in London the English football club Chelsea played a home game against a rival Fulham the game ended in a scoreless draw but Bloom's fans were so excited they stayed to chant after the game soon these words were in articles all over the world because in just one month Chelsea had spent 329 million euros on new players more money than all the clubs in the French Italian German and Spanish Football League spent combined we have a club like Chelsea and they fit they can do everything I mean it's an extraordinary amount of money but it's what Chelsea's owners believed it needed to do in order to succeed in the most competitive most popular and richest football league in the world the English Premier League the English Premier League these sums of money are just getting bigger and bigger the problem is that the Premier League's clubs have grown so rich that the rest of Europe can't keep up it's very difficult to be competitive against English clubs it is so far ahead of all the other leagues the Gap seems to be widening so how did the English Premier League get so rich and how is that a problem for Europe's favorite sport [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] I need to start by explaining how football Works in Europe [Music] starting in England around the 1860s people began organizing official football clubs and playing each other eventually they divided these clubs into a tiered system the worst clubs played down in these leagues and the best up here but clubs could move within this system at the end of each season the bottom two clubs in a league would be demoted to the league below a punishment called relegation but the top clubs would be promoted up it puts Competitive Edge to everything this is James Corbett a senior reporter at Off Pitch you know effectively you could have a village club that might be in tier 10 of English football and if you do the right things you know they could be playing in the first division in the decade you do have those fairy tale stories Wimbledon sixth in the first division in their first season in the top flight from the verge of a football fairy tale by the mid 20th century these five leagues in the biggest five countries had most of the best players and therefore the best clubs but every year the best club from every league would play each other in a big tournament at first called the European Cup it was an opportunity for clubs in any country to win big in the 1980s clubs from 16 different country leagues reached the semi finals and in that period a Portuguese Dutch and even a Romanian Club want he signed it again who won the European Cup but football was about to change and it began in England with a tragedy on April 15 1989 700 people were injured and 96 killed at a game in Sheffield England when poor crowd control and Stadium design led to a stampede it was the low point for English football after a disastrous decade English stadiums were falling apart and attendance at matches was plummeting and English clubs were banned from European tournaments after a fight between fans killed 39 in 1985. the English vocal was a game in Decline you had rioting you had hooliganism you had racism it was like another sense of all of society's ills disputes between clubs and television broadcasters resulted in none of the English top League's games airing on television during the 85 and 86 season so many of England's best players fled to play in the other European leagues by 1990 a few people were desperate to turn things around specifically the owners of England's five richest and most popular clubs Arsenal and Liverpool big clubs wanted a bigger share of broadcast revenues centralized marketing you know they saw the benefit of that in U. S Sports and essentially they saw they saw an opportunity in 1992 they led a group of 22 clubs to break off and form a new league called the Premier League and they designed it to be English football's Resurrection [Applause] [Music] [Applause] the Premier League served as the new top league in English football it controlled its own TV rights which it sold for 427 million euros to a satellite TV company cash that the clubs then use to find new ways to make money and modernize the game they renovated and built new stadiums that could fit more fans and they started selling sponsorships and merchandise all over the world but it was satellite TV that made the biggest difference allowing the games to be broadcast to new audiences like in the US and Asia the Premier League was able to more than double the price for its rights in 1997 and again in 2001.

it is one of the great success stories in global sport crucially the Premier League divided its TV Revenue relatively equally between clubs which made them more competitive Spain Italy and Germany all gave more TV money to its most successful clubs which led a few dominate year after year by 2004 the Premier League had successfully turned English football around becoming the wealthiest league in Europe and some very rich people were noticing hey I'm Sam Ellis and welcome to search party I'm gonna really quickly say thank you to today's sponsor incogni every year there are more and more data breaches and it's because there are now countless data Brokers out there possessing our personal information that's our names Social Security numbers login credentials location history online activity it's a lot and they put it up for sale the thing is we have the right to take it all back and incognit will do it for us it's been a game changer for me and it's how you can take back control of your data and it just takes three super easy steps first you create an incognito account and tell it whose personal data you want to remove second you grant Incognito the right to work on your behalf so they'll contact the breachers and request the removal of your personal information and third is the best part you can sit back relax and let incogni handle any objections from data Brokers keeping you updated every step of the way it's a good feeling knowing that someone is out there right now taking my name off these lists and right now Incognito is available risk-free for you for 30 days that means you can try it out and see for yourselves and if you're not happy with this service you get a full refund and there's one more added bonus and cogney even takes care of those pesky people search sites the ones that create detailed personal profiles on millions of Americans you won't have to worry about your information ending up there either so you can join me in the millions who have already entrusted their privacy to incogni so I want to thank Andy for sponsoring our very first video and you can go to encodney. com search party clicking that link will help support this Channel and it gets you 60 off in cognito's annual plan and it's risk-free if after 30 days it's not a good fit you get your full refund thanks to cogni for supporting our journalism now let's get back to the story this is Roman Abramovich he is a Russian businessman who back in 2003 was worth almost 10 billion euros and he wanted to buy a football club he settled on a West London club named Chelsea which was in deep financial trouble he paid around 199 million euros for the club and to relieve its debt then immediately injected Millions more of his own money to buy almost a dozen excellent players from clubs in the Premier League and across Europe even while the club lost money he added more that was the big moment because he came in and he had a level of wealth that was just beyond anything that the Premier League had ever seen before Chelsea quickly won the Premier League in 2005 and 2006 and began consistently qualifying for and advancing deep into the all-european tournament since renamed the Champions League Abramovich proved that you could buy success in the Premier League and it encouraged other owners to try it for themselves throughout the 2000s a new class of wealthy and mostly foreign owners began buying and pumping Millions into Premier League clubs it helped that at first the Premier League had very few rules on who could buy a club and how much they could spend on it premier league has always been sort of quite known interventionists any investment as good investment so these new owners began making the already rich clubs richer While others boosted some smaller clubs into notoriety was a member of oil Rich Abu dhabi's royal family who in 2008 bought Manchester City yeah man city moved it up another notch because you had the resources not just the wealth but the resources of a nation-state he spent over 1.