It had already been a historically lucrative day for the Premier League and there were still two envelopes left on Richard Scudamore’s desk, at the offices of law firm DLA in central London.
It was June 2000 and Scudamore was overseeing his first domestic TV rights auction. He had brought in David Kogan to run the process and they had succeeded in making more money for the league than ever before: £1.1 billion from Sky Sports for the live rights and £328 million for pay-per-view from NTL. The only issue left to settle was the weekly highlights show.
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The BBC had been showing Match of the Day since the 1960s, and the show had featured highlights of the Premier League on a Saturday night since the competition’s inception in 1992. When Scudamore opened their envelope he saw that they had offered £40 million per year, double what they had previously been paying. But when he then examined ITV’s bid, he saw it was more than half as much again. £61 million per year, £183 million in total. The Premier League knew ITV was serious, but no one had expected this.
Scudamore looked across the room at Kogan and told him that the Saturday highlights programme would be leaving the BBC for ITV.
“You have got to be fucking joking,” Kogan replied. “Who’s going to phone Greg Dyke?”
It was the start of a new millennium and British football broadcasting was in a state of flux.
Richard Scudamore had taken over as Premier League chief executive in November 1999, and one of his priorities was to make more money from the next cycle of TV rights. Scudamore wanted some expert advice so started looking for a new media rights advisor, eventually bringing in Kogan and his company Reel Enterprises. Kogan promised to drum up what he called “an atmosphere of competition” before a sealed-bid auction. The main aim was to get more money from BSkyB — under new chief executive Tony Ball — for the live rights.
Ball was not the only big appointment of the time. That November, Greg Dyke had replaced John Birt as director-general of the BBC. And he was determined to make a splash. The BBC had its ego bruised by losing Des Lynam to ITV in the summer of 1999, and Dyke wanted to fight back. This was a different era for the BBC: less about value for the licence-fee payer, more about throwing their weight around in the marketplace.
In the opposite corner was ITV. It was flying high: quiz show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? had just launched, and the new controller of ITV Sport Brian Barwick had succeeded in poaching Lynam. “It was Barwick who influenced me to change channels,” Lynam tells The Athletic. “Brian was a big man in lots of ways, physically and also ambitious.”
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“The competition on the market was as buoyant as I can remember,” says Simon Johnson, ITV’s director of rights and business affairs at the time. “ITV was quite bullish at the time and riding high with ratings. The BBC had an aggressive rights strategy led by Greg Dyke. It was all about a splash, all about winning.”
The Premier League highlights were not the only subject of competition between the BBC and ITV in the spring of 2000. This was a rare moment; all three major broadcasting deals — the Premier League, the Football League and the FA’s own deal — were up at the same time.
The FA package contained England games and the full rights to the FA Cup. This had previously belonged to ITV but Dyke fancied the idea of a dawn raid on their rights. So the BBC worked jointly with BSkyB to woo Adam Crozier at the FA. It put together an attractive package: England’s competitive games would be on BBC One, friendlies on Sky Sports, and the FA Cup shared between the two, and promoted better than ever before. BBC and Sky between them offered £400 million.
But while the BBC was secretly preparing an ambitious bid for an ITV property, Barwick was planning an even more ambitious move for the BBC’s own crown jewels. Barwick knew the public power of Match of the Day, having been its editor for nine years. And now, having taken its host, he wanted to grab the whole show for himself and his new employers. It was about, as Barwick puts it now, having “a foothold in English football”.
It was also about money. ITV wanted to win more of the young male demographic. It knew how popular they were with advertisers and felt that ITV’s family-friendly light entertainment offering was not bringing them in. How better to do so than with Premier League football?
ITV knew that it had to offer something other than just “Match of the Day with adverts”. So they devised a plan to revolutionise football broadcasting forever: bringing the Saturday evening highlights programme forward from 10.30pm into an earlier slot. ITV wanted to show the highlights at 6pm, in what TV executives call a “shoulder-peak” timeslot. Even if it meant ripping up its normal entertainment schedule — Blind Date and the rest — to do it.
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This bold proposition gave ITV the courage to bid high. If it could get millions of young men watching ITV on a Saturday, then this set of economic rights would be worth paying well over the odds for.
“The way that ITV valued its rights was it took the product and tried to make an assessment of what revenue it would generate from advertising and sponsorship,” explains Johnson. “So we were getting guidance from the sales houses, and they had to make an assessment of what the value was.”
By the end of the 1999-2000 season, these two parallel processes — for FA and Premier League rights — were coming to a climax. The first shock came when the FA agreed on the deal with BBC and Sky. This was a surprise to everyone, not least the BBC. But it hoped that no one would know about it while the Premier League process was still ongoing. There were aspirations at the BBC of holding both packages simultaneously and dominating terrestrial live football.
At the climactic stage of the process, ITV got wind that the FA package was leaving the channel. ITV knew that if it failed to win the Premier League rights, its football offering would be limited to live Champions League games. “We probably did think we might finish second in the FA rights,” Barwick admits. “Did that encourage us to go for the Premier League rights? To have a foothold in English football, regular football, that was probably part of the thinking…”
So it was full steam ahead for ITV. “We were in the position where we could only win one or the other,” Johnson says. “We couldn’t afford to win both. What we didn’t want to find is that we had won nothing.”
The process was not resolved by the first round of bidding. The Premier League had inserted a “buffer”, forcing the process into a second round if there was a margin of less than 10 per cent between the first two bids. So ITV came back with their second bid, submitted 13 minutes before the deadline: £61 million per year.
There is a theory that, all else being equal, the Premier League would have rather kept its highlights on Match of the Day. It understood the value and cachet of being on the BBC every Saturday evening, rather than on commercial television. If the BBC had been able to match ITV’s offer, the clubs might have rather stayed put. But when Scudamore opened the envelope and saw a number more than three times what the BBC was currently paying him — and 50 per cent more than its new offer — the game was up.
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This was a devastating day for the BBC, in the unanimous view of multiple insiders. It was maybe the worst moment in the history of BBC Sport, losing its flagship show.
After losing the auction, Dyke tried to argue that ITV’s winning bid made “no economic sense” and that the clubs would have rather the BBC had won. He was accused by the Premier League of “sour grapes”. But no bickering could distract anyone from the weight of the defeat. The great Kenneth Wolstenholme lamented the BBC “going out of sport”, and the “end of an era”.
Basking in the glow of its expensive victory, ITV had 14 months to plan the new show. And the first thing it had to confront was the matter of the time.
ITV’s initial plan was to show the highlights at 6pm, just over one hour after the 3pm kick-offs finished. It would have been technically difficult to turn round the whole show in time, but ITV was confident that it could do it. “Previously, nobody would have taken that on,” Barwick says. “But because of modern technology, we were confident enough to think we could get it on the air.”
If ITV could edit the programme in time, it felt it would make more money at 6pm than one hour later. “From a sales perspective, it would be perfect to lead into Saturday-night light entertainment,” says Johnson. This was the logic of shoulder-peak time, using the football to set up a big audience for whatever ITV showed at 8pm or after that. “There was a feeling that if they could put something on at 6pm that was male, young and required funky coverage, that would lead into a very successful peak time. That was why we wanted to go with 6pm.”
But ITV needed the Premier League to agree. Scudamore said that he supported it but that he would have to put it to the clubs, who presumed that the show would start at 7pm. So ITV gave a presentation to the clubs at a London hotel, trying to persuade them that 6pm made sense. But the clubs did not see it that way, insisting that their fans would not be able to get home in time for the earlier start.
Nor was Sky Sports keen on the 6pm start. When Barwick discussed the idea with its head Vic Wakeling, there was some resistance. Barwick says that Wakeling was “nervous about the near-liveness of that proposition”, and that he feared 6pm highlights would hurt Sky’s live rugby league games shown at the same time.
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So 6pm was off the table, and ITV had to go with 7pm. And David Liddiment, the ITV director of programmes, had to build a schedule to fit around it. Even if that meant moving Blind Date out of its prime slot, to the fury of its millions of viewers and its host Cilla Black. Speaking just before the launch, Liddiment called it “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to change the shape of Saturday night TV”.
The other question was what the show would actually look like. And the key here was the successful launch of Channel Four’s cricket coverage in the summer of 1999. Production company Sunset + Vine had revolutionised cricket on TV with new technological innovations — Hawk-Eye and the Snickometer — as well as a new technical slot called The Analyst. And ITV wanted to do the same with its football coverage.
The first thing it found was ProZone. This was an analytical toolset up in the late 1990s by two businessmen, Ram Mylvaganam and Neil Ramsay, allowing users to track players’ movements during a game. They had taken it into Derby County, and from there to Manchester United, where Steve McClaren had used it during the treble season of 1998-99, then to Aston Villa. Based in a rented warehouse above a hosiery factory in Leeds, ProZone’s team of analysts, converting match footage into 2D animation, were increasingly in demand. Barwick and his deputy Jeff Farmer were desperate to get them on board.
The other invention was the Tactics Truck, ITV’s version of The Analyst. All that this would require was putting Andy Townsend in a separate vehicle, allowing him to dig into one particular incident after the game away from the rest of the studio team. “We didn’t reinvent the wheel,” commentator Clive Tyldesley says now, “as much as put rollers on instead of wheels, and completely change the engine.”
Then there was the issue of the team. Front and centre would be Des Lynam, who had moved from BBC to ITV before the Premier League highlights did. He was a huge figure in British television at this point and was thrilled by the prospect of hosting Premier League football again, but now at a more amenable time. “It was better because you’d just watched the football live,” he says. With the new start time, Lynam would be able to get back to his home in Chiswick by 9pm.
ITV had some of the best on-screen talent — Terry Venables, Ally McCoist, Ron Atkinson and Andy Townsend, as well as a strong team of commentators: Guy Mowbray, Peter Drury, Jon Champion and Tyldesley. “If you look back now it was an unbelievable line-up,” says Tony Pastor, the show’s programme editor. “The commentary line-up is incredible. Most people would say that those four, with the exception of Martin Tyler, would be the four best commentators at work in the last three decades.”
Pastor and Paul McNamara were two producers on Match of the Day who were recruited by Barwick from the BBC after he had plucked the jewel from their crown. They were excited by the prospect of working on a new show, at a new time, and with a clean slate. Although they did not get completely free rein to do what they wanted, and not just because Rick Waumsley, ITV Sport’s head of production, had already chosen “Beautiful Day” by U2 as the title song.
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When Pastor and McNamara joined, they were informed that ProZone and Tactics Truck would be a big part of the new show. “I distinctly remember me and Macca raising eyebrows at it, we were concerned,” Pastor says. “But I know the thinking: Channel 4 had made a big splash by innovating around cricket, and there was a strong feeling that we needed our technical innovations to push on the coverage of football.”
But that long stretch from winning the rights to showing the football was more time than ITV needed, enough time maybe to complicate its idea about what the show was meant to be.
“We tried too hard,” Barwick says now. “We had a year to think about what we should put in the show. And that’s a year too long. Everybody comes up with some good ideas. And by the time you put the good ideas in, you’ve not left enough room for the football. Although those issues were ironed out very quickly.”
“Some fool at ITV — not Barwick or Liddiment, somebody else — said, ‘We’ve got to make sure it’s not just Match of the Day with adverts’,” Lynam recalls. “But that is exactly what it was: Match of the Day with adverts!”
The title, the tune and the time were all in place, ProZone and the Tactics Truck were set up, and everything was ready for the launch day on August 18, 2001. The last thing left to decide was how Des Lynam would open the first show.
Production staff spent a long time agonising over it but they eventually decided to lean on the fact that everyone knew Lynam was happier with the 7pm start time than he had been with 10.30pm at the BBC. Producer Paul McNamara came up with the words that would launch the new era of British football broadcasting: “Better for me, better for you, better for all of us.”
Although the 7pm show lasted 75 minutes, a second longer show went out at 11.15pm, with more highlights and analysis than it had time for in the first slot. “At ITV, we do it twice a night on Saturdays,” was how Lynam opened it.
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But when the two shows went out, the British media did not see it quite that way. One piece in The Guardian called it a “staggeringly inept football highlights programme that seemed to deliberately go out of its way to insult the intelligence of every football fan in the country”, before saying that Premiership Parliament, a Monday night spin-off show, was even worse.
In those opening weeks of the season, everything came down to one particular question: could ITV make the 7pm start time work?
The first issue was the technical challenge of turning the whole show around in just over two hours, rather than the five and a half hours the BBC used to have. The whole team would spend Saturday afternoon at ITV HQ on the South Bank (taking over the old This Morning studio), the on-screen talent watching the football and playing cards while the production staff scrambled to get the footage together. They could not even watch all of the 3pm kick-offs simultaneously so were often left waiting for the highlights to be sent in to them. Once, the goals from Elland Road did not arrive until after the 7pm show had started, forcing them to push the game down the running order to make the last desperate edits in time.
Then there was the fact that a 7pm football show had to justify its place in a light-entertainment schedule on commercial television. Because it was on at shoulder-peak time at 7pm, the ITV schedulers were desperate that it should pass on a big audience to the next show at 8.15pm, a concept known as “inheritance”. So while Match of the Day could put the best games on first, before fans went to bed, The Premiership had to do things differently. They would often keep the best games until last, to make sure that they had as big an audience as possible to pass on to the next show.
The best example of this came with one of the best games of the 2001-02 season, Manchester United’s 5-3 comeback win at Tottenham in September. If viewers tuned in at 7pm expecting to see the game, they had to wait through Charlton 2-0 Leicester, Bolton 0-2 Sunderland, Derby 0-2 Arsenal and the rest before they got to see the game they were all waiting for — with Des Lynam interviewing David Beckham — at the end of the show. “The idea was: let’s play the best game last,” says Barwick. “It sounds madness that, but it’s not. It’s commercial television.”
The problem for Barwick is that his show was replacing a giant of light entertainment: Blind Date. (For our younger and international readers, this was a dating show in which contestants would choose a potential partner from behind a screen before they get to set eyes on them.) Blind Date was a huge hit, routinely getting 7 or 8 million viewers per night. When Blind Date was moved to accommodate The Premiership at 7pm, there was uproar, not only from the show’s many viewers but from its veteran host herself.
“We had challenges, one of which was Cilla Black campaigning quite effectively to get her show back in the early slot,” says Pastor. “Our perception was that she felt as though she was a victim of moving from 7pm.” Black (who Lynam says had a “tantrum”), called Granada TV chairman Charles Allen to try to get her show reinstated.
When the first episode of The Premiership went out, it drew 4.3 million viewers. The next few episodes stayed above the 4 million mark but they were nowhere near what Blind Date used to draw. And over at the BBC, the schedulers were delighted that they could put their own light-entertainment output up against ITV’s £183 million purchase. On the launch day of The Premiership, BBC1 showed a “reality TV special” of quiz show The Weakest Link followed by a 7.30pm edition of National Lottery: Winning Lines, before Auntie’s Bloomers with Terry Wogan. The Weakest Link drew 6.7 million viewers.
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After the September international break, BBC1 unveiled a new Saturday evening schedule, including Jim Davidson’s Generation Game and Dog Eat Dog, a game show fronted by Ulrika Jonsson that would routinely get over five million viewers. National Lottery: Winning Lines would usually get close to eight million.
Panic started to set in at ITV. The gamble of replacing Blind Date with The Premiership was done on the assumption that football highlights would work at shoulder-peak time. That was the entire logic of the £183 million bid and it was being blown out of the water by Phillip Schofield and his lottery show. ITV knew that it simply could not lose the ratings battle on Saturday evenings. It was already in an advertising revenue slump and could not afford for it to get worse.
The internal pressure soon became too much to take. ITV had set the show an internal target of 5.5 million viewers to be viable and it could not even make that. Liddiment had to deliver peak time viewers to his advertisers and he could not do it with football. In late October, the decision was made: the show would be moved back to 10.30pm, no matter how much money and hope had been invested in it. “At that point,” Simon Johnson says, “the price-v-return equation went out of kilter.”
For those working on The Premiership at the time, the climbdown felt like a humiliating defeat. They had spent more than a year working on this — Liddiment himself had called it a “once in a lifetime opportunity” — and it had lasted just over two months. “We had to be realistic with ourselves,” says Barwick. “David had a job to do, to make sure he was allowed to take the appropriate course of action. And if it was a bit of custard pie in the face of us guys, so be it.”
Lynam had to issue a statement clarifying that he would not be resigning over the move, and looking back now he describes it as a “bit of a blow”.
“After the first show got panned in the press they rang me up and Liddiment said: ‘Don’t lose your nerve’,” says Lynam. “But it wasn’t my nerve that was lost — it was theirs.”
When the news broke, one tabloid headline read, “CILLA 1-0 DES”. The final 7pm edition of The Premiership went out on 3 November. The first Blind Date back in that slot got 7 million viewers.
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“Women look after the children all week and on a Saturday people go and watch their own football team,” Black told the Evening Standard ahead of Blind Date’s 7pm return. “When they come home and the whole family is there, they want entertainment. Football isn’t light entertainment. That’s nothing against Des, but that’s the way it is’.”
The Premiership stayed in its 10.30pm slot for the rest of its run until the end of the 2003-04 season. And it settled down into its form for the rest of its run: a higher-production, sometimes innovative Match of the Day, most obviously distinguished from the BBC show by the fact of having adverts.
To fans who had grown used to 90 minutes of uninterrupted programming, those three or four commercial breaks meant that the show could never be as good as what it replaced. And it did throw up a challenge to a team who had largely come from Match of the Day for how they should handle it.
Lynam, who would always rather have worked without adverts, decided not to acknowledge their existence at all. “I never mentioned the adverts or the break,” he says. “I never said, ‘Don’t go away’, which irritates me beyond belief. I just used to finish what I was saying, let the adverts run and pick it up again. When I see the host look down the lens and say, ‘Don’t go away’, I want to smash the TV.”
But while Lynam could afford to rise above it, his production team could not. They were very conscious of not losing people between the breaks and had to keep them on board. “We had to put so much production into every break that we went to and came back from,” McNamara explains. “‘Stay with us!’, ‘Coming up!’. The VTs we made, the music we put in. The whole production value of the show was really, really high. People were working their plums off to make the show so sparkly and great, so it didn’t just feel like three middle-aged men talking about football.”
This is why ITV featured the Tactics Truck and ProZone on the show, although only one of those survived the move away from 7pm. The Tactics Truck was quietly sent to the scrapyard but ProZone ploughed on, with Terry Venables dragging the icons around the screen. “It was a fantastic analytical tool for Premier League coaches, but it wasn’t a fantastic analytical tool for television,” says McNamara. “And they are two different things.”
To the modern eye, the idea of a special section devoted to granular analysis, talking a player through the game, does not sound as ridiculous as many deemed the Tactics Truck at the time. Nor does the use of animation technology to show patterns and movements in a clearer way than match footage can. Both of those elements are part of what has made Sky Sports’ Monday Night Football so popular over the last 10 years. Maybe, in this sense, The Premiership was ahead of its time, and back in 2001 neither TV executives nor viewers were quite ready for it.
“Mistakes are part of the process of progress,” says Tyldesley. “On reflection, you could certainly argue that we tried to change too many things too quickly. But what was ridiculed yesterday tends to become the norm tomorrow.”
But put the adverts and the analysis together and a feeling developed that not enough time was being left for the real business. “There wasn’t enough football, there could have been more,” Lynam says. “They were filling up what could have been football time with the Tactics Truck and ProZone. It was a bit of a mess really.” Tyldesley agrees that, on balance, there was “too much talk and not enough football”.
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As it happens, its contract with ITV helped ProZone to fund more analysts and get its work to millions more people every week. And some of the analysts from The Premiership days have gone on to have huge jobs in English football since, including Michael Edwards, the sporting director at Liverpool. Maybe Barwick and Farmer signing up ProZone changed English football in a way they could not have imagined at the time.
Still, it was a high-quality, well-produced highlights show, with authoritative commentators and an entertaining studio team. It raised the bar in terms of what viewers could expect from a highlights programme, even if it could never shake the fact that it had failed at what it initially set out to do. “Reputationally, it would always be referred to as ‘the beleaguered Premiership’, in a negative way,” McNamara says. “But we really raised the production level of highlights programmes. I don’t think it was acceptable just to come on with, ‘Hello, here’s a load of highlights’.”
Just because it failed to deliver on its promise to change the face of Saturday evening scheduling, it does not mean that it failed to show the football well. “By trying to do something brave and different, we fell short, in terms of being able to get our ambition realised,” Barwick says. “But we dusted ourselves down and put together, we think, over those three years, a programme that really was strong.”
There was nothing fundamentally wrong with The Premiership, other than the fact that it largely resembled the show that it replaced. “If you look at the show for the remaining two and three-quarter years,” says Pastor, “it looked remarkably like Match of the Day.”
Or, as Lynam puts it: “Match of the Day with adverts was never going to be quite as successful as Match of the Day without adverts.”
At the end of the second season of The Premiership, the rights to the highlights packages were back up for renewal for the next cycle. And Brian Barwick and ITV had a decision to make: should they try to keep hold of the show or not?
On the one hand, there was still huge prestige attached to showing those highlights on a Saturday evening. If ITV had wanted to make a splash by seizing the BBC’s crown jewels, they had certainly achieved that.
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But on the other hand, ITV had paid £183 million for something that had failed on its own terms, as a radical transformation of Saturday evenings. It was just far too much money for something shown as late as it was. “It was unlikely that we were going to go and renew that deal,” Barwick says now. “Simply on the basis that the money we paid for it was really for a product that we wanted to put out earlier in the evening.”
And ITV also knew that if it wanted a big foothold in football that was also cost-effective, the answer was live. ITV had the rights to live Champions League games, and a big Manchester United or Arsenal game would always draw more people than a highlights package.
So when Kogan and Scudamore opened the bids for the next cycle, there was nothing like the same aggressive competition for the highlights package. The BBC was desperate to win them back after the humiliation of three years ago. But it knew that this time they was not going to get gazumped by ITV. This time, the BBC was pushing against an open door.
The BBC’s winning bid was £105 million over three years. At £35 million per year, that was just over half of the £61 million per year that ITV had committed to three years before. Even in this era of inflation in the cost of Premier League TV rights, not everything had to keep going up. Match of the Day would be returning home for the start of the 2004-05 season, after three years away.
The final episode of The Premiership went out on May 15 2004, as Lynam reflected on Arsenal’s Invincibles not losing a single league game all season. “So, a day when footballing history has been made, a perfect ending to the championship,” he said, before cheekily adding, “I can’t see it being matched. Goodbye.”
(Lead graphic: Sam Richardson, Getty Images)
