mainly going

to be the Premier League.

The negotiations have been going on now for five months.

So just to go back a step.

So four or five months ago, I gave a speech in which I basically said – to misquote Tony Crosland in 1973, where you and I are probably the only people who have enough to remember, the party's over.

And the party's over in the sense that the Premier League and the EFL last negotiated a relationship in 2019, and that ran out in 2024.

They were due to renegotiate it.

Well,

Yep

...

Martin Edwards, the thing about those owners were two-- there were two factors.

One, they were pretty much local businessmen who bought their clubs.

And secondly, they'd helped create the Premier League, and there was, even though they all hated one another, they actually all came together as a collective for the good of the Premier League.

And what we were there to do was make them money.

Now, what you have is a very different set of owners.

Any form of political interference on the way we operate is gonna result in my resigning from this role." Has there been an attempted interference, David?

Would you acknowledge that this has not been the best start?

Well, okay, let me just start off by saying about being on this podcast, this is part of a process of transparency that I'm absolutely committed to from within the regulator.

And you and other journalists who wanna interview me, we've been entirely open to those interviews and will continue to be so.

So I'm very happy to be here.

I'm very happy to answer questions, and I'm happy to come back in six months or a year from now where you can check my answers today and see how much they stand up to what we actually do.

Now, when it comes to the, the experience of the last week or two, and I say this as a non-politician, it's been a very odd experience being in the eye of the political storm as I have been.

And I am going to go back on what actually happened here.

What are we doing here?