The business of football increasingly defines what fans consider success
As a Spurs supporter, I believe the club showcases many of the tensions at the heart of the modern game
In our book Still Dreaming, Alex Fynn and I attempt to paint a portrait of the state of top-flight English football today. Through the prism of a club both of us know well, Tottenham Hotspur, and its attempts to succeed at the highest level, we wanted to look at how success was defined and achieved in modern football — and what that meant for the game and those who follow it.
Our story began in the sunshine at Carrow Road, as the Spurs players, fans and then-manager Antonio Conte celebrated qualification for the Champions League on the last day of the 2021/22 season. Perhaps the greatest irony was that a club that had — just 13 months before — tried to set up a breakaway, closed European Super League (ESL), was now celebrating qualification to a competition it had tried to sabotage, from a league it had twice wanted to wreck, firstly with Project Big Picture and then with the ESL. A year is a lifetime in football.
By finishing fourth, Spurs were guaranteed a minimum of £35m just by qualifying for the Champions League group stage. That’s before matchday revenues in 2021-22 of £106m. Factor in broadcast and commercial revenue and, after a successful run in Europe (the prize money alone earned from the run to the 2019 Champions League final was £94m), total turnover could approach £500m.
What all that indicates is that it is now virtually impossible to talk about football without talking about the football business. Where once football was an escape, with conversation almost exclusively focused on wins and losses, tactics and trophies, the excitement and entertainment of two teams attempting to best each other, now business was never too far away. That’s really why teams celebrate coming fourth as well as first. You might not get a trophy, but you stay where the money is.
Sure enough, excitement was ramped up when the club’s owner ENIC – not famed for its profligacy over the course of its 21-year stewardship – announced on the day after those celebrations in Norfolk that it would be putting £150m into the club. Was this to take advantage of an opportunity for the club to move ahead of its rivals? Again, an appraisal of the situation was as much to do with business as football.
And so it was that I got a phone call from Alex Fynn, who I worked with on One Step from Glory, a book telling the story of the club’s run to the 2019 Champions League final and the impact of then-manager Mauricio Pochettino. He wanted to know if I’d help him write another book.
Alex was a long-time observer of both Spurs and Arsenal, and a media and marketing expert who had been deputy chair of advertising giant Saatchi & Saatchi. He helped Tottenham Hotspur create the first TV advertising campaign run by a football club and advised both the Football Association and Football League. His work with the FA eventually led to the creation of the Premier League. He’s been called ‘the spiritual godfather’ of that competition, although as Alex will be quick to tell you, the Premier League we got is not the one he envisaged.
Five years after the formation of the Premier League, Alex published a critically acclaimed book called Dream On alongside long-time Spurs fan H Davidson. That book looked at football’s development through the lens of a single season at Spurs. Reading it now, it comes across as a chronicle of a club losing touch with the modern world.
With the Premier League celebrating its 30th anniversary, Alex wanted to update the story, and he asked if I’d help. I’ve supported the club since the early 1970s, travelled all over Europe to watch them, spent nearly 10 years co-chairing the Supporters Trust and dealing with the club’s board — and I write about the business of sport. The idea was right up my street.
Despite the many criticisms levelled at it, the Premier League is a huge commercial success. Transfer windows provide a stark illustration of how dramatically the game has changed since the competition’s formation. In 1996, the first Sky contract was reaching its conclusion and the new one priced domestic TV rights at £670m – up from £191.5m. The beneficiaries of that inflation — the clubs — were starting to flex their muscles to entice foreign stars to these shores.
The big transfer deal of summer 1996 came when Newcastle United paid £15m for Alan Shearer from Blackburn Rovers, beating Manchester United to his signature. The deal made Shearer the world’s most expensive footballer, costing £2.2m more than Barcelona had paid PSV Eindhoven for O Fenomeno – the original Ronaldo. Elsewhere, Parma signed Lilian Thuram for £4.5m, and a certain Zinedine Zidane joined Juventus for the princely sum of £3.2m. Nowadays, those figures are more likely to be the monthly wage of anyone at the top end of the market.
In 2022, Spurs were in something of a unique position. Alone among the self-styled Big Six, the club had won nothing for 14 years. And the longer that timespan became, the more the question would be asked about whether Spurs really was a top football club, or just an exceptional sporting enterprise; a club still run by a UK-based businessman more akin to a traditional club owner than its nation state and petro-dollar-owned rivals – albeit with the significant involvement of one of the world’s richest Bahama-based tax exiles. In modern football terms, Spurs were the underdogs, a club that should be nowhere near a chance of competing at the very top. But there they were, hanging in. And their rivals were faltering.
Arsenal were facing their sixth season outside Europe, Chelsea no longer fuelled by Roman Abramovich’s billions, and Manchester United in disarray under the ownership of the Glazers. Newcastle United were now owned by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia — a fund the Premier League assured us was unconnected to the Saudi state — but that project would take time to brew. Which left UAE-owned Manchester City, the richest club in the world according to the Deloitte rankings of the time, and Liverpool, backed by the wealth and sporting expertise of Fenway Sports Group and one of only two English clubs (the other being Manchester United) to be long-established, truly global brands.
Tottenham Hotspur had done well out of the Premier League. The club’s turnover in 1996-97 (14 months) was £27.4m. In 2021–22 (12 months) it was £443m. Matchday revenues at its new stadium were £106m a season. This was success — of a sort. But what would unquestionable success look like?
Winning the League Cup would break the trophy drought, but that would not bring much prestige. The FA Cup would be something more, but the competition was not what it was. The brutal reality of modern football, aided — it must be said — by some spectacularly careless stewardship of the world’s oldest club knockout competition by the FA, dictates that a victorious FA Cup run is only what might be expected of a Big Six club.
These days it is only the Premier League or the Champions League that can put you at the summit. Of the two competitions, the Premier League appeared the more likely, if distant, prospect. To work ‘in old money’ and recognise that the top division was relevant for well over a century before the Premier League came along, a third league title would put Spurs on a par with Huddersfield Town. Emulating them would be a stupendous achievement. To provide more perspective, if Spurs failed to win the league, the club would have gone the entire second half of the English league’s existence without being champions.
True, a single Premier League title would put Spurs on equal terms with Blackburn (1995), Leicester (2016), and Liverpool (2020), but with the latter, you would need to factor in their six European Cups/Champions Leagues. Spurs are still trying for their first.
It’s a sad fact of the modern game that even gaining a trophy is not what it was. It really wasn’t that long ago that securing one of the four prizes on offer in any season was significant in its own right — and the reason was their scarcity value. Now, success is measured in multipacks. One trophy is no longer truly meaningful. It has to be part of a double or treble or quadruple. When only a handful of clubs contend every competition year after year, the scarcity value is diminished, and mission accomplished has to come from something more, some elevation of a simple victory to something grander.
It would be too easy, a little trite even, to say that football fans have become spoiled. Or, to be more specific, that the fans of the top clubs have. When the game is being run by those at the top for the express purpose of ensuring that they stay at the top, then the lack of variety in the list of winners is inevitable. If Spurs did win the Premier League or the Champions League, it might be the start of something. But it could also be seen as the least that needed to happen, or something expected under the laws of probability.
Tottenham Hotspur’s tale, and the tensions around it, showcase the tensions at the heart of the modern game. In the book we look at the erosion of Saturday 3pm culture and what it means for the game and for fans, the influence of TV and whether the game has got the balance with its paymaster right, the evolution of European football competition, the impact of a mid-season World Cup, what’s happened to ticket pricing, the death of a monarch and how the game reacted, and possibly the most spectacular managerial meltdown in football history.
Our conclusion was that Spurs remain better placed to succeed than most clubs. If those in charge, on and off the pitch, have a clear vision and stick to it, there is every reason to be optimistic. And despite the efforts of many proprietors to reduce the element of jeopardy so essential to making the Premier League the vibrant force it is, the view of the great Danny Blanchflower still resonates. Asked who he thought would win a game, he answered with words that fuel the dreams of all supporters at the start of a new season: “I don’t know, that’s why they are playing the match.”
• Still Dreaming: Another Year in the Life of a Premier League Club by Alex Fynn and Martin Cloake, (Hawksmoor Publishing, 2023), Amazon paperback price £14.45
Martin also authors The Football Fan on Substack
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