Richard Scudamore – Sports Management – Ian Freeman

Image, we’re so often told, is everything, and, in the past ten years, no sport’s image has suffered from negativity more than Premier League football.

The media revels in accusations of overpriced tickets, merchandise rip-offs and fat-cat clubs, while spluttering faux-righteously over the alleged antics of those on the pitch – the whingeing, spineless managers and their multi-millionaire, party-loving juvenile- delinquent players.

Those of us lucky enough to have spent an hour in the company of Richard Scudamore, the likeable, reserved business professional who runs the Premier League, come away with the reality. The Premier League is, quite simply, a hugely successful, proficiently-run commercial enterprise, dedicated to the well-being of the game, spearheading an inclusiveness which encourages every one of its 21 shareholders – the 20 clubs plus the Football Association(FA) – to thrive, on the world stage, both on and off the pitch. Says Scudamore “We don’t get involved with the Barnum and Bailey side – ours is about the business, rather than the ‘roll-up-roll-up-for-the-show’ part.”

“The beauty of the Premier League is we can get all 20 press officers or commercial directors or finance directors to all sit around a table together” he goes on. “One of the joys is to see them share ideas. We have some really talented people – they are attractive jobs working for attractive brands and therefore they attract top talent.”

The Premier League’s shareholding clubs all have voting rights - the FA has none, but, says Scudamore, “certain things can’t happen without them exercising their golden share.” At the end of every season, three share certificates are unceremoniously snatched from relegated clubs and give to those who have been promoted. To soften the blow of demotion, aptly-named ‘parachute payments’ are made to those clubs - for two seasons, they receive one-half of the basic award given to a full Premier League club, plus a share of overseas income and sponsorship money.

“The rule book determines exactly what happens to our commercial income and broadcasting revenue, and our expenses come out of only one pot – the remainder is distributed between the clubs” says Scudamore. “Our income is distributed to a precise formula, including the 5% of our gross domestic TV money which goes to good causes.”

Scudamore recently launched the Premier League’s 2005 community report, ‘Young People Matter’, which has served to collate under one banner the raft of good works undertaken both by the League centrally and the clubs themselves.

Auditors Deloitte and Touche calculate that goods and services worth some £80 million were donated by Premier League clubs to community projects over the past season, with an additional £20 million a year redistributed to the game’s grassroots through the Football Foundation – a Premier League, government and FA joint venture - from the League’s domestic broadcast deal.

Twenty years ago, the Football League and the Professional Footballers’ Association set up the ‘Football In The Community’ initiative as a six-club pilot coaching based scheme in the North-West, aiming to encourage closer links between football clubs and their local communities and to help improve the image of the game. Staffed mainly by ex-players, there are now more than 90 such initiatives around the UK.

“Over last seven years or so, the clubs have migrated and expanded the concept into a much wider setup” says Scudamore, “and ‘Young People Matter’ shows how it’s grown beyond coaching. We’re using the power of football - not necessarily the game itself - as the key driver, the stickiness, that makes the programmes fly.”

Of schemes under the ‘Young People Matter’ umbrella, Scudamore cites as of particular note ‘Playing for Success’, an education scheme, in partnership with the DfES, for pupils identified as needing a boost in skills such as maths and literacy. Children attend their local football club out of school hours and are coached by experienced teachers in numeracy by using, for example, football results to learn how to work out averages. Literacy is encouraged by producing match reports on football matches they have watched, improving their writing, reading and computer skills. Players often turn up and take part – “listening to Alan Shearer or Kieron Dyer is a very different and effective way of learning!” he says.

Other Premier League initiatives include working with The Princes Trust to use football clubs as bases for a development plan for young ex-offenders or under-achievers, to which the Premier League has just signed for another £2m commitment, jointly with the PFA. “It’s hard to sell a concept like The Prince’s Trust to the young disaffected, but put them into a programme at a Premier League club and it’s a whole different concept – and then adding in a named, iconic player will take it even further” says Scudamore. “The point of corporate social responsibility(CSR) is, if you can you should, and it would be a waste not to harness this power we have for something good.”

“Young people don’t respond particularly well to the local health inspector or the crime prevention officer, but what we do is make uncool things cool. If you’re bussed into a football club to sit at a computer and learn geometry by looking at a football pitch, and then Gareth Southgate turns up, it’s clearly a way of livening up learning. When you put young people into a football environment, they engage and soar.”

Scudamore is pleased with the clubs’ receptiveness to the CSR religion. “They’re always looking to stretch their agenda, and there’s nothing we’re not touching – health, education, crime reduction, drugs - but it’s not all about targeting groups, we are broad appeal and not just going after those who have fallen into some other place.”

Scudamore admits, unashamedly, that there is also a quasi-business reason for the Premier League’s involvement in CSR - young people are the fan base of the future, and such schemes keep them interested in football and in the clubs. “Also” he says “there’s the self-esteem and development aspect for the players – they are young adults who have been thrust into the limelight with good incomes early in life, and they haven’t had normal grounding. This is character-building and morale-boosting for them and for the people who work in the clubs, as well as for our own staff.”

I tentatively suggest it may also be a way to counteract the game’s negative media image.

“It certainly does that, but it’s not the sort of thing that makes good headlines” Scudamore says, as his press officer nods in furious agreement. “It’s unfair – the odd isolated incident gets blown up out of all proportion. Young players do understand their responsibility and these incidents are minimal when you consider the number of footballers there are.”

Scudamore sees the focus on business strength as organic growth rather than stifling the purist. “I just think we’ve grown extra arms” he says. “Thirty years ago, it was all just on the pitch, but there’s been a huge expansion in the other aspects. People say the game isn’t what it used to be, but the proposition is the same as it’s been for 120 years –11 people play 11 people, crowds get excited, you get points if you win, teams get promoted and relegated, and players move from club to club. And referees still make mistakes – but now with 24 cameras watching them, instead of one or none!”

Of Arsene Wenger’s call for changes to the points system to spark up more on-pitch competitiveness, Scudamore says “I’m a fan of the pure competition. It’s simple – you win, lose or draw and I think we would mess with that at our peril. Look at other sports. Playoffs in rugby - you win the league and then you have to play someone else to see if you’ve won it or not! How does that work? You look at a rugby table with three weeks to go and you can’t tell what you have to do to win it!”

A perceived shift in match attendance figures, the somewhat fragile measurement tool of seat prices and entertainment value, has recently attracted scrutiny from the media and the clubs themselves. “Figures are exactly where they were last year, at 53,600” says Scudamore. “We couldn’t go on growing capacities as we had been doing – there are physical restraints, such as stadium capacities and the number of people living in each town. People were analysing August’s attendances and making it a case for the whole season. One Manchester United game can shift the average season attendance by 600 – it’s just maths.”

Scudamore has been Premier League CEO since 1999, following two years in the same position at the Football League and ten years in senior positions with the Thomson Corporation media group, latterly as head of its American newspaper operation. His no-nonsense – some may even say hard-nosed – approach to the business of football is clearly appreciated by the League’s shareholder clubs. Michael Grade, BBC chair and a director of Charlton Athletic FC, says “I like Richard. He’s very controlled and very smart. I often wonder how he manages the ego-maniacs who call themselves club chairmen!”

“People think we have a lot of money, but we have absolutely none” Scudamore says, in response to fat-cat jibes. “Our TV deal money arrives on August 1^st, we take 5% off the top for the good causes, and on August 5^th, it’s all gone to the clubs and we have to watch the bank statements to make sure we have enough money to pay the staff! There’s a big contrast between the Premier League’s formulaic approach, where all the money is already apportioned, and the approach of, say, FIFA or UEFA, where money is held centrally and distributed at whim.”

The Premier League is a member of the PerCent Club – Business In The Community’s voluntary benchmark, measuring contributions made by companies though cash donations, staff time, gifts in kind and management time, shown as a percentage of pre-tax profits. The League ranks high in the top ten companies, hot on the heels of HBOS, BP and their own sponsor, Barclays.

“If you want to be a serious player in the business community at large, you need to measure yourself against other serious businesses” says Scudamore. “The difference with the £30 million plus we donate is that it is relative to turnover, not profits, as we are non-profit making.”

The Premier League’s future income has been the cause of considerable speculation since the well-documented negotiations with the European Commission over the allocation of TV rights, which at times took on the intensity of an on-pitch, red-cardable scrap.

“We were frustrated with the EU, yes” says Scudamore, now the dust has settled. “We gave them commitments in December 2003 which envisaged leaving the current deals in place, in exchange for promises as to what would happen next time. We’ve spent the last 18 months putting the meat on those promises and we got into a fairly public arm-wrestle with them. But, with willingness and common-sense on both sides, I’m pleased to say we’ve reached an agreement. Once that gets its formal sign off, we can then go to market, and that’s an exciting time for me.”

TV insiders believe that Sky will remain the dominant force in Premier League television, but BBC, ITV and BT may also bid for part of the juicy package for which Sky have this year reportedly paid £340 million.

“If our income goes down the 5% goes down, and that would threaten our investment in grass roots football” Scudamore says pointedly. “More worryingly, I’m certain that if clubs’ individual incomes are reduced, they would start to look at where they spend money, and some of their, and our, CSR work would suffer.”

“This is the best football competition in the world” says Richard Scudamore. “It’s the best because we have embraced all cultures – we’re fiercely proud of the fact that we have more nationalities playing in our league than any other. It’s also to the benefit of the England national team, as anyone who makes that team will have come through the Premier League and competed against the world’s best. We have the largest worldwide TV audience and some of the world’s top sporting superbrands.

“What has happened in the past twenty years is that there’s been a huge improvement off the pitch. What did we have then? Heysel, Bradford, Maggie’s membership scheme - which would have cut gates - and no TV deal! It was a shambles. Rather than a football competition, what this country now has is a football industry.”

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