The It's to 800 million homes in 188 countries. Crowds attending matches last season were at an all-time high

with a total attendance of 15.2 million over the 380 matches. Our guest today is Richard Scudamore, who was the

Premier League's Executive Chairman after 20 years in charge of the

organisation. I'm Mark Chapman.

Matt Slater is with us as well. This is the Athletic Football Podcast. Richard let's start with when you first got the job as CEO of the Premier League.

What were you tasked with doing? What did the clubs want from you number one on their list?

Well I think most jobs in sport like that normally something's happened to make them vacant.

There's usually some sort of crisis somewhere. in this case my predecessor had signed an agreement that

gave away quite a slug of the Premier League's TV value to media rights advisors and so cost him his job a decent chap though he was he made a mistake. And so you come in and the first job really is just kind of building trust and because people are angry and there's a lot of anger around even more so now probably than when I

when I got the job back then and especially if you're a sports administrator and so the first job really was just to build some trust and then you, of course, you get the opportunity quite often, particularly at the Premier League to make some decisions. And it's that's, I mean, that's what's facing you and I do remember distinctly thinking well these guys you know there were some angry people around the table and they weren't people that you necessarily wanted to see angry the Allen sugars and the Kim Bateses and everything else they were

they were forceful people and it was it was a bad it was a bad period in the

Premier League's history Peter Peter leave was the got my predecessor

obviously Rick Perry had been a steady hand on the tiller for, you know, for the first two years.

And so that was really what was facing you, and you have to build some trust and you have to make some decisions.

And then of course you do get the opportunity very, very quickly to do some deals and ultimately, you know, the Premier League was formed mainly as a marketing collective. The pyramid hasn't really changed, does it? You know, it's still three up three down, it's still, you know, linked to the Football League heavily and therefore it really was a marketing collective and that's you're very frequently faced with opportunities to show them that you know a little bit about about that space and that's kind of how the how the genesis of my time there started.

Once you have that trust, you have to maintain it, don't you?

And maintaining it, I would imagine, over the 20 years

was quite difficult.

As people change around the table through promotion and

relegation but as ownership changes. You make an interesting point. You never

complacently think you've earned their trust forever, any of them. You know, so because you're always, you know, a mistake away or a decision away from upsetting something.

People think it's a sort of a facetious thing but I always

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