The Americans are coming. Or rather, they’re already here, and already launching the next step in a takeover by stealth that may only just be entering its imperial phase.
English football has always had its own quiet obsession with American scale, American razzmatazz, and above all American money. In the late 1970s Jimmy Hill and his consortium members managed to lose a million dollars a year on the Washington Diplomats franchise in the North American Soccer League, a venture that saw Hill and co pay $200,000 to watch an injured, essentially immobile Johan Cruyff score a single brilliant goal from inside his own half before the whole thing folded.
“I have never forgotten it, or how much it cost,” Hill wrote of that Cruyff goal in his autobiography. “And to this day I look very carefully at any business deal that arrives with an American accent.”
On Sunday morning the US’s fifth richest corporation launched its own arrival as a Premier League player with a trip down the Thames on an Amazon Prime barge. Invited parties were offered the chance to hobnob with celebrity guests, perform some kind of “crossing skills” challenge, and generally do lots of things that have little to do with English football and quite a lot to with the more familiar business of high-end salesmanship.
There is almost something reassuringly rickety about this unveiling, something reassuringly ITV Digital. English football has always been a stage for speculators. From flighty club chairmen to Rupert Murdoch’s dish-led transformation, the league carries the sweaty fingerprints of a century’s worth of rain-makers and carpetbaggers.
At which point, enter Jeff Bezos, who distinguishes himself from this company first by his status as the planet’s wealthiest person, the man who sold the world back to itself in cardboard boxes. And second by the scale of Amazon’s operation, a footprint that allows the Premier League to be offered as a loss leader for the main business of overseeing the digital logistics of a large portion of the human race.
Be afraid, traditional broadcasters; and, indeed, traditional supporters. This could yet be a profound point of change. Kicking off with Crystal Palace v Bournemouth on Tuesday night Amazon will stream its package of 20 Premier League games across the next three and a half weeks. Coverage is bookended by a simulcast of five games on Wednesday night and then six – yes! Six! – on Boxing Day.
Clive Tyldesley will act as the lead commentator. A mob-handed posse of 43 talking punditry heads has been hired, among them Harry Redknapp, Alan Shearer and Gabby Logan. It is a reassuringly glossy, reassuringly familiar-looking package, menaced only by the prospect of substandard UK streaming speeds.
But step back a little and this is all part of a wider transatlantic insurgence. Bezos may have the look of a wide-eyed alien frontiersman, but he is following a well-trodden path. The arrival of the Silver Lake investment company at Manchester City last month means seven Premier League clubs now have some form of US ownership. Sky Sports, architect of the boom years, is a US-owned company these days following its sale last year to the broadcast giant Comcast.
In the last few months even the newspaper industry has been jolted by the arrival of The Athletic, self-styled Netflix of sports writing, funded by American venture capitalists and openly hostile in its cash-splurging attack on the market share of traditional British media.
At the end of which Wednesday night’s Merseyside derby will see British football fans watching the US-owned Premier League leaders on a US-based internet service – with the chance to read about it all on a US-owned subscription website the next day.
This is, of course, a sign of continuing commercial good health. The Premier League has succeeded as a global product. Choice, we are told repeatedly, is only good. Welcome to the great global bazaar.
And yet like every other aspect of football’s transformation, this comes with a price tag. Amazon’s entrance to the marketplace has been trumpeted as something entirely beneficial. News reports have described the deal as “breaking the stranglehold” of existing broadcasters. Some have written of the freebie offer to existing subscribers and new sign-ups as somehow returning football to free-to-air status (a laughable suggestion: Amazon is nothing if not a mindbogglingly expert cash-raking exercise).
Players will earn more, clubs will spend more; every part of the football industrial complex will welcome this frothing new income stream. But in reality this money comes, as ever, from those who pay to watch. The entry of BT Sport into this marketplace was similarly trumpeted as a golden moment of choice. In practice it became necessary for football supporters to pay twice, to engage with yet another monthly contract, just to receive essentially the same service.
With the entry of a third major provider it remains a late-stage capitalism kind of choice. No matter how glossy and fun the Amazon product, how high the players’ salaries, English football fans are basically still being sold the same things they already owned in the first place.
The prospects for genuine change depend on how far Amazon intends to go. This is a company with pockets deep enough to effectively take control, to blow Sky out of the water. Amazon Prime is the most profitable part of the business. With the Premier League thrown in it would perhaps generate significant growth in the same way Premier League football carried Sky’s early satellite service.
But there are also hazards. The success of the English league is based on its strength in depth, which is in turn based around collective rights deals, the idea that all clubs in the top tier distribute revenue as evenly as possible. This is a kind of holy founding writ of the Premier League, the principle that allows clubs such as Leicester to challenge however briefly the dominance of the commercial giants.
Some clubs, most notably Manchester City, have railed against this distinctly English way of doing things. Amazon’s streaming service would make it easier than ever to disregard, to sell access individually at the click of a mouse, allowing the bigger clubs to pitch themselves as global revenue monsters to be measured only against Real Madrid, Barcelona, the Dallas Cowboys, the next series of Game of Thrones.
For these reasons some will perhaps hope that Amazon is only dipping a toe in these waters. There is an opportunity to change this landscape completely, although into what is another question altogether. Greater revenue, a better service; or another small step in English football’s journey into pure commodification.
