Richard Scudamore

Well, I think, you know, and it's an answer that I think I understand people find fairly unsatisfactory, but it's the answer I give, which is we look very closely at the legislation and what we can and cannot do in terms of taking a view on any individual.

Clearly, when he tried to buy Chelsea, which was in 2004, Richard Scudamore then at the Premier League would have regarded him as being a fit and proper person.

He obviously had the money to buy it.

He obviously had the money to keep it going.

But when it came to a consistent view about how the Premier League should be operating, essentially as a commercial operation, My job is just to make it more money.

There was a pretty broad consensus among those owners about the forward direction of where the league should go.

Today, Richard Masters, unlike Richard Scudamore, has a much more difficult job because what he's got are a group of owners who are individualists.

There isn't the collective sense of driving forward.

Now, I suppose there are a few things to say here.

One, the Premier League, and this is part of its kind of success, it's certainly part of its strategy, was to be a bit like... uk right old-fashioned liberal economics laissez-faire we we will try and be light touch with our regulation we are open we're a trading nation these are all the things it said and i think these are the things it meant and that the guy who's running the premier league at the time called richard scudamore sincerely and genuinely believe this and still does that part of the premier league success as a global kind of institution now, is that it was open, open to foreign players, foreign managers, foreign investments.

And that is one of the reasons why its global TV earnings, for example, its global commercial earnings are so high.

So that's the first thing to have in mind.

And again, because of the podcast, people seem to think that I've got an in at the club and no certain things, but I was asked by probably half a dozen people yesterday.

What's going on? Is it a happy club? And I'm like, I don't know anything, but yeah, as far as I know, I mean, I don't think there are any issues from that point of view, but clearly Steve Lansdowne, James Ellis, Charlie Boss, Richard Scudamore, et cetera, shouldn't be happy that we're 16th in the table.

You know, they just shouldn't.

Sure they aren't.

That's a big win for Richard Masters, the chief exec of the Pr- of the Premier League, and that's a guy who's been under a lot of pressure.

To give the background on this is that Richard Masters took over from the legendary Richard Scudamore, who had been, um, the chief exec of, of the Premier League for 20 years and had overseen a period of immense growth in revenues during that time.

Now, how much of that was actually down to Scudamore? Mm, open to question because the fact is the Premier League was gaining in global popularity for reasons which were beyond just what the chief exec of the Premier League might do or say in his negotiations with TV companies.

But broadly speaking, he was given a lot of credit for the growth of the Premier League from the late 1990s through until, I think it was 2016, 2017.

And yeah, as you say, like it's, it is the culmination of this era of law fare.

Uh, it's, it's also the necessary other side of the coin to something we'll get into, which is Richard Scudamore's regulation light ownership model neutral approach to, to the Premier League as a whole, whi- which did actually help turbocharge its initial rise to this level.

But like I've, just having a few, been having a few people or conversations with people who've worked around the Premier League over the past few days and the past, who've worked in it for the past few years, and like one of them would say, like, when you compare this to a story of broadly comparable initial news headlines, obviously it's not the same scale, but like Tévez, Mascherano, West Ham, and [laughs] the discussion to me that was, that was essentially sorted out in a room as if they were kind of golf club members Like, I mean, it, it, like, the, the, this, this was, this was what regulation in the Premier League used to be like.

That it was, as, as is the name of our friend and colleague Josh Robinson's book, The Club.

And, you know, there's lots being said about his predecessor, the fellow who was the chief executive of the Premier League.

for many years Richard Scudamore in those years of growth and now what success he had but he also had a very light touch approach to regulation and any any kind of things really kept in house in that era and Richard Masters with this has really put his head above the parapet to be honest maybe because the ownership mix has changed a lot of American owners in the Premier League that didn't exist before probably wanted something done here as well but this to me is is a huge moment.

And some people say it's bad for English football, bad for the reputation of the Premier League.

But then I would ask, wouldn't it be worse for the Premier League to not do anything in the face of rampant cheating? It should not take eight years, and that's the lesson here.

Though again, I would stress no one should criticize the Premier League for taking, for taking this.

And in some ways, this Premier League era under the chief executive R- Richard Masters is he's had to deal with the legacy of his predecessor, Richard Scudamore, who were very regulation light and obviously as regards owners.

Um, the, the phrase was ownership model neutral.

And all of this ultimately comes from that.

Well, this week's guest spent almost twenty years turning the Premier League into a global commercial powerhouse.

We were lucky enough to get Richard Scudamore's thoughts on Manchester City.

But of course, in true news tradition, it was minutes before the Manchester City charges dropped.

So we haven't got his thoughts on that, but we do have his thoughts on, uh, fans, investment in the game, and of course, the independent regulator.

But it wasn't until then that this was really laid out.

But I mean, uh, even the fact that even the most basic questions weren't asked is of a piece with the, this, the Premier League era under Richard Scudamore, which is extremely light in reg- in regulation and extremely light on scrutiny of ownership, where basically the o- the only bar to being an owner was a criminal conviction.

Mm.

And it, it opened up a world of problems, and we, we are facing, facing the reckoning of this now.