Record Premier League TV deal

The sighs of relief were audible in Porsche dealerships from Wilmslow to Berkeley Square last night after the Premier League confirmed it had agreed TV deals worth a record £1.782bn with BSkyB and Setanta for its next tranche of live British rights. What flows into the top echelon of the English game tends to flow straight back out into the players' bank accounts but nobody can dispute that £1.782bn was up there with the best results of an intriguing season. So up it floats again, the Premier League balloon, defiantly refusing to burst even in the harshest economic climate. English club football will continue to pay the best wages, attract the best players, and be the most successful, on and off the pitch. It was announced earlier in the week that Sky had won the auction for four of six packages of rights available. Yesterday provided confirmation of the price paid, plus news that Sky had won one of the two remaining packages, and thus five of the six 23-game packages altogether. Full Article

Credit crunch is hitting Roman Abramovich

The fact that Chelsea's players have had their free ticket allocation reduced from eight to four seats per game suggests the credit crunch is hitting Roman Abramovich as hard as anyone. Now a new financial survey claims that the Russian owner's wealth has plummeted by £3.8bn in a year, from £10.8bn to £7bn, to send him tumbling from the top of British football's rich list to a humbling third place. To add insult to the injury inflicted on his wallet, Abramovich has not only been overtaken by a fellow Premier League club owner but a man who is part-owner of a Championship club. Full Article

Unfinished business at Derby County

There is "unfinished business" at Derby County for the Clough family, Nigel Clough admitted last night, also revealing that his father had been "very tempted over the years" to return to the club as manager after his dramatic walk-out more than 34 years ago. Clough, as he was presented as Derby's new manager, insisted that he did not feel he was about to try to complete the sense of unfulfilment felt by his late father, indicating that it had died with him, but added that he had had to "take the emotion out of the equation" before accepting the job himself. "I know he said never go back but he was very tempted over the years to come back because he felt there was unfinished business," the 42-year-old said when reminded of his father's declaration, three years after his departure, that he would not return to Derby. Full Article

Bad financial conditions

The global economic downturn has brought a halt to the era of top English football clubs being taken over by rich investors, according to Keith Harris, the merchant banker who, in the boom years, advised a string of overseas businessmen to buy Premier League clubs. Harris says that financial conditions have deteriorated "even for billionaires" whose fortunes have been directly affected or who have become more cautious. Club owners cannot, he said, any longer expect to find wealthy individuals willing to buy them out and take clubs on. "We're in the toughest economic situation anybody has endured in our lifetime," Harris, of the firm Seymour Pierce, said, "and that means we are unlikely to see much activity on the football takeover scene." Full Article

Arsenal: Alisher Usmanov on the board

Danny Fiszman, Arsenal's second largest shareholder, has admitted for the first time that the club may give the Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov a place on the board. The jewellery millionaire, who now lives in Switzerland, has also criticised the spending policy at Chelsea by branding it "financial doping" and asking "What will happen in two, three years?" at the Stamford Bridge club. The acknowledgment over Usmanov, who was born in what is now Uzbekistan, represents a complete reversal of Arsenal's stance since the businessman began buying into the club last year through his Red and White Holdings vehicle. It continues the gradual revolution at executive level at the club, which at the end of last week claimed its highest profile victim, Lady Nina Bracewell-Smith, who left complaining at the "appalling way I have been treated". Full Article