England’s Premier League: Can the Unscripted Drama Continue to Excite the World?
Speaker Series: Richard Scudamore
Chief Executive, The Football Association Premier League Limited
Breakfast, Saturday, 22 July 2017, 09:15-11:00 am, The Hong Kong Club
How Richard Scudamore Took England’s Premier League into the Top Tier of Global Sports…And What Still Keeps Him Up at Night
Event Details:
Mr. Nick Sallnow-Smith on behalf of The Stanford GSB Chapter of Hong Kong is pleased to invite you a special short-notice breakfast with Richard Scudamore, Chief Executive of England’s Premier League, the world’s most successful football league, to discuss the challenges and opportunities it faces, post-Brexit, post-rise of China, post-rise of streaming alternatives to traditional broadcast, at home and abroad.
To a casual observer, the 20 team-member Premier League has “few mountains left to scale.”
Under Scudamore’s 18 year-leadership, the Premier League boasts the world’s third most lucrative domestic TV broadcast contract (roughly USD 2.3 billion, annually) and generates more in international sales than any other sports league. It is watched in 900 million homes across 229 countries and territories and boasts 8 of the world’s 20 most valuable football teams. This turnaround, beginning with the Premier League 1992 formation (succeeding the old FA First Division) and accelerated under Scudamore’s leadership, would have seemed unlikely to a mid-1980s observer, and near impossible to business students given that a super-majority of 14 of the Premier League’s 20 teams must agree to any key decision.
In the mid80s, English football was synonymous with violence and hooliganism. The key drivers that changed this iconic British business were, firstly, the symbiotic rise and nurturing of competitive television rights (Murdoch’s Sky TV breaking the BBC/ITV duopoly) and, secondly, the 1995 Bosman ruling which allowed EU footballers to transfer to another club and effectively led to the globalization of the Premier League talent pool. Today, 70% of all Premier League teams have foreign ownership, 66% of all players are foreign born and, since 1992, all winning team managers have been foreign born (vs. only 1/3rd, prior).
And yet Scudamore, the world’s most successful football league executive – and professionally trained lawyer and trained football referee – sees challenges on the horizon.
Geographically, China represents both a possible ally (PRC capital buying stakes in UK teams, Chinese viewers making the Premier league their most-watched sports league) and a possible challenger (the China Super League paying European-level player transfer fees, including GBP 60 MM for Chelsea’s Oscar to move to Shanghai). Europeans, in Spain, in France and in Germany, have begun to challenge Premier League dominance of the richest teams with American and Indian leagues starting to flex their muscles. Tech and illegal broadcasts remain on an on-going concern. Meanwhile Brexit remains perhaps the greatest unknown of all on how it will impact the League’s ability to attract and retain global talent.
Where, then, does the Premier League, one of the great UK export success stories, go from here? The Stanford GSB Chapter of HK could not be more honored to have Richard share his insights, experience and wisdom on all of the above. We hope you can join us.
Speaker’s Bio: Richard Scudamore
Richard Scudamore, 58, is the Chief Executive of England’s Premier League, having held this position since November 1999, overseeing all operations including regulatory, legal, political, and broadcasting and central commercial rights, reporting to its 20 member clubs.
From 1997 to 1999, Scudamore was Chief Executive of the Football League, covering the 72 professional clubs outside of the Premier League in the First, Second, and Third divisions as well as the Football League Cup. Scudamore began his career at Yellow Pages, a then-division of British Telecom, rising to the position of Group Sales Director, then worked with Ingersoll (acquired by Thomson Newspapers), eventually rising to Thomson SVP in charge of all American operations.
During Scudamore’s Premier League tenure, he has negotiated the largest broadcasting and sponsorship contracts in the history of the league, roughly £5.5 billion for the 2013-2016 season versus £1.2 billion in 2001, and has overseen the international commercial broadcast expansion of the Premier League to key markets as India, the Middle East and North Africa.
Scudamore has seen the League through several challenges, including “tapping up” at Chelsea and Arsenal (illegally approaching players to sign with another team) and taking steps to crack down upon on third-party club structures obscuring true club owners. In parallel, Scudamore has led numerous initiatives to improve the financial viability of Premier League clubs, including introducing team salary caps for the first time. He has remained an ardent defender of non-British individuals having the right to own clubs, noting that it is the “quintessential English” nature of the clubs that drives their appeal, and leaves untouched their “iconic Britishness”.
In April 2017, Scudamore was named co-chair of the UK Sports Business Council with sports minister, Tracey Crouch. Earlier, Scudamore is a founding board member of the Football Foundation, overseeing more than £230 million of Premier League contributions to grassroots football charities. Scudamore studied law at the University of Nottingham and was Head Boy at Kingsfield School in Kingswood, Bristol. Scudamore is married to Catherine and has five children: Jamie, Chloe, Patrick, Ned and Lara, is a qualified level 5 football referee and a lifetime Bristol City F.C. fan.