Joshua Robinson - The Club: How the English Premier League Became the Wildest, Richest, Most Disruptive Force in Sports

Copyright 2018 by Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-328-50645-0

Cover design by Brian Moore

Cover images Pornchai Kittiwongsakul / AFP / Getty Images (crown), Getty Images (lion); Shutterstock (soccer ball)

Endpaper map by Carly Miller

e ISBN 978-1-328-50647-4
v1.1118

To Daniella
and
to Katie and Evie (who is exactly as old as this book)

On a recent morning, amid the daily hullabaloo at Londons busiest transit hub, the commuters at Waterloo Station went about their Underground rituals, demonstrating some of the vital skills of living in their cityhow to carry a smartphone and a cup of hot tea in the same hand; how to open an umbrella without causing a public-safety emergency; and how to absolutely, positively, never, ever make eye contact with anyone else.

And down by the newsstand near the escalators, the dozens who stopped to pick up their daily newspaper showcased one very particular everyday skill essential to British life: how to read a tabloid.

Like almost everything else in this country, it turns out theres a right and a wrong way to do that. The page numbers are merely a suggestion.

The right way starts with a glance at the headline pun on the front and an obligatory sigh for the state of humanity. Situation normalall is not good.

But these Londoners didnt stop to read on. They knew what they were doing. Without batting an eye, they took a quick sip of tea and flipped the entire paper over to find the news that really mattered.

Starting from the back, over dozens of pagesalmost one-third of the entire newspaper in some casesthey found stories dripping with urgency, intrigue, outrage, and absurd amounts of cash; a breathless global pursuit of billions of dollars driven by an ensemble of outsize talent and ego, the stakes of which, readers are assured, are nothing less than the fates of cities, regions, and nations.

This was the stuff they really needed to start their days: the latest from the English Premier League. From West London, where a Russian oligarch keeps his club in a state of permanent revolution, to North London where warring factions are locked in a spiral of endless one-upmanship, to Manchester, the countrys old industrial hub, where a sudden and dramatic power shift is rewiring the dynamic between two ancient institutions. Caught in the gears between these empires are the smaller teams in market towns and mining counties where soccer is the only thing that keeps them from falling off the map. And this whole world is constantly animated by oligarchs, sheikhs, American tycoons, Asian Tiger titans, and a bunch of high school dropouts who have been millionaires since their teens because of their skill with a ball at their feet.

All of which combines for a pretty full day of reading, more than enough Premier League excitement to compete with the stuff in the front of the papers about the latest parliamentary crisis and all that.

Far beyond the morning scramble at Waterloo Station, the speculation and vague nuggets of truth contained in the red-tops also powers an international rumor mill that, on a daily basis, captivates a dizzying number of fans around the world, reaching over to the other side of the Atlantic, clear through Asia, and all across Africa, with a few researchers in Antarctica probably keeping tabs on it all, too.

The rise of the English Premier League is a story about the sports worlds wildest gold rush. In the span of twenty-five years, the leagues twenty clubs have increased their combined value by 10,000 percent, from around $100 million in 1992 to $15 billion today. During that time, the league has also exported its product to every corner of the planet.

How this happened is a tale of how the country that invented the worlds favorite game reinvented it and how a handful of secret meetings in 1992 spawned a crazy quarter century in which money, ambition, and uncommon drama turned an ancient league into the most obsessively followed sports product on planet Earth.

The story of how English football took over the world is a business and entertainment saga for the global age. Its a familiar one, at that. It begins with a bright idea. What follows is a period of supercharged growth and frothy ambition, which leads to thrilling highs and unimagined riches. If you know anything about the dot-com boom or subprime mortgages, you know where this is heading.

The cracks start to appear. Lured by outlandish valuations, investors from far-off places pitch up to grab a slice of the action. Competitors emerge. Short-termism replaces sound judgment. And pretty soon the whole enterprise has degenerated into a tawdry mixture of peacock egos, pathological greed, and shocking profligacy.

The Premier League is a timeless tale of boom and bust, no different from all those other bubbles they warn you about in business-school textbooks. Except, that is, in one crucial respect.

In football, the bubble never burst.

As any British train station newsstand will prove, here and now in the twilight of the newspaper era, one rule seems to be enough to keep no fewer than nine national dailies in business: There is no such thing as too many soccer pages. On any given morning, those nine newspapers will generate roughly one hundred pages of copy on the Premier League between them. And thats only in print media. Britains fanatical coverage of its most popular product this side of the sandwich also buttresses twenty-four-hour sports-news channels and fills the airwaves 24/7, 365 days a year. Even in the off-season.

And thats only in Britain.

Considering the fact that the Premier League is chronicled in such minute, neurotic detail every day of its existence, the idea of a complete history would be both impossible and laughable. It would be like trying to chronicle the ins and outs of stock-market fluctuations over a period of twenty-five yearsa lot of numbers, a lot of lunatics in pinstriped suits, and not at all fun to read.

But there is one aspect of English soccers modern history that hasnt quite been unpacked: the inside story of how the Premier League became the Premier League Inc., not just a football product but the global sports, business, and entertainment behemoth it is today. This is the story we want to tell.

English soccer didnt begin in 1992. But that year, which marked the foundation of the Premier League, became the sports BC/AD milestone, the defining moment when nothing would be recorded the same way again.

So how to tell the crazy story of everything thats happened since?

We started, unwittingly, by living through it. We were both raised in the UK in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000sthe same period when English soccer transformed from a hyperlocal community activity into a worldwide entertainment monster. Robinson, who is half French, fell for the Gallic charms of Arsne Wengers Arsenal and has yet to recover. Clegg, who grew up in Essex, succumbed to the more roguish qualities of Harry Redknapps West Ham. Our contrasting soccer afflictions independently led us to the same career as sportswriters.

And as we obsessively followed the Premier Leagues rise, something else was unfolding 3,500 miles from any English soccer stadium that would transform the leagues global reach. America started paying attention. Our coverage, informed by soccer conversations on both sides of the Atlantic, led to our charting an impressionistic, episodic history of the major inflection points in the leagues history. Right in front of us was an impossible-not-to-tell version of the Premier Leagues first twenty-five years.