Why the Premier League Still Rules the World

The Premier League returned on Friday night with champions Arsenal beginning their title defence with a 3–0 victory over newly promoted Coventry City. This weekend Manchester United travel to Hull City and Liverpool begin their campaign at Newcastle United. It is the start of another 380-match season, but the significance of the competition now stretches far beyond what happens between August and May.

Thirty-four years after its launch, the Premier League is no longer simply England’s leading football competition. It has become one of Britain’s most successful cultural exports: a weekly sporting drama followed across almost every major market in the world.

And that scale was never inevitable.

The Breakaway That Changed Football

The modern Premier League grew from a radical restructuring of English football. First Division clubs signed the Founder Members Agreement in July 1991. In February 1992, the 22 top-flight clubs resigned from the Football League and, three months later, the Premier League was established as a limited company. Its first season kicked off on 15 August 1992.

The commercial turning point came immediately. BSkyB secured the first television agreement in a five-year deal worth £304 million — an extraordinary sum at the time. Television money, increasingly sophisticated broadcasting and the arrival of leading international players gradually transformed an English domestic championship into a global entertainment property.

The remarkable part is not simply that the Premier League became successful. It is that, more than three decades later, its commercial trajectory is still upwards.

The League’s latest economic-impact research estimates that it has 1.9 billion followers worldwide and is broadcast in 189 countries, while its annual broadcast export revenue has reached approximately £1.8 billion. Deloitte reported that Premier League clubs generated a combined £6.8 billion in revenue in 2024/25, forecasting that annual revenue would move beyond £7 billion in 2025/26.

At home, the current four-year television agreements with Sky Sports and TNT Sports, running from 2025/26 through to 2028/29, are worth £6.7 billion. More Premier League football is being televised in Britain than ever before.

Yet money alone does not explain why people keep watching.

Liverpool and Manchester United: The Global Anchors

The Premier League sells 20 clubs, not two. But it is difficult to understand its worldwide development without acknowledging the extraordinary pulling power of Liverpool and Manchester United.

They now stand together on 20 English league championships each, the two most successful clubs in the history of the English championship. Their stories have also captured different generations of the international audience.

Liverpool’s extraordinary domestic and European dominance during the 1970s and 1980s created support far beyond Merseyside long before social media existed. European Cups, famous players, Anfield and You’ll Never Walk Alone travelled around the world with the club.

Manchester United then became the defining team of the Premier League’s formative television era. Under Sir Alex Ferguson, United won 13 Premier League titles, while players including Eric Cantona, David Beckham, Ryan Giggs, Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo became global sporting personalities.

The timing mattered. As satellite television carried English football into millions of new homes, Manchester United were repeatedly competing for the biggest prizes.

Liverpool and United therefore became something more than successful football clubs. They became gateways into English football.

A supporter in Bangkok, Lagos, Mumbai, New York, Dubai or Melbourne might originally be attracted by Liverpool or Manchester United, but the product they eventually consume is the Premier League. They watch those clubs play Everton, Sunderland, Brentford, Brighton or Nottingham Forest. They discover the grounds, managers, rivalries, relegation battles and histories of the other clubs.

The biggest brands bring audiences through the door. The Premier League then turns those audiences into followers of the competition itself.

The modern numbers show that the effect has not disappeared. Liverpool recorded a cumulative global television audience of more than 588 million across all competitions during 2024/25 and has passed 200 million followers across its global social accounts. Manchester United reports more than 260 million social connections, while its official supporters’ club network has expanded to 362 recognised branches across 95 countries.

Arsenal, Manchester City, Chelsea and Tottenham also command enormous international audiences, of course. But Liverpool and United possess a particularly valuable combination of scale, longevity and inherited support.

Their rivalry connects two great northern cities, industrial history, European success, iconic managers and generations of families who have passed their football allegiance down to their children.

That history cannot simply be created by a marketing department.

Why Everybody Gains

This is where one of the Premier League’s most important decisions becomes crucial.

Its broadcast rights are sold collectively, rather than by individual clubs.

Domestic broadcast income is distributed with 50 per cent divided equally between the clubs, 25 per cent according to league position and 25 per cent through facility fees linked to televised matches. International income also contains a substantial equal-share element, with additional growth distributed partly according to sporting merit and rules limiting how wide the central distribution gap can become.

In other words, Liverpool, Manchester United and the other internationally powerful clubs help attract enormous worldwide audiences — but they do not simply take that television value for themselves.

Everybody benefits from the strength of the collective product.

The 2024/25 figures demonstrate the principle. Every Premier League club received £29.8 million as an equal share of UK broadcast revenue, £59.2 million from the equal international share and £7.9 million in central commercial revenue before merit payments and television appearance payments were taken into account.

Champions Liverpool ultimately received around £174.9 million in central distributions. Southampton, who finished bottom, still received approximately £109.2 million.

There is still financial inequality, particularly once individual sponsorship, matchday income and European revenues are included. But the Premier League does not allow its biggest attractions simply to take the television value they generate and leave everyone else behind.

That matters competitively.

A global audience may initially tune in to watch Manchester United or Liverpool, but the spectacle becomes more valuable when Brentford, Brighton, Bournemouth or a newly promoted side can afford talented players, improve facilities and genuinely threaten them.

The giants help sell the league. The league then uses part of that money to strengthen the opposition.

The English Culture Television Cannot Manufacture

There is another reason the Premier League has proved so difficult to copy.

Its television product is still built around a genuine football culture rather than the football culture being built for television.

Grounds remain filled by supporters whose connections to clubs stretch through families and generations. Away supporters travel the country. Local derbies carry histories that existed decades before international broadcasting. Promotion and relegation mean membership is never guaranteed.

Coventry’s return this season after 25 years away from the Premier League is precisely the type of story that gives the English pyramid its appeal.

Even the traditional Saturday 3pm broadcasting blackout tells us something important. Despite broadcasters paying billions for Premier League content, matches during that traditional Saturday afternoon period are still generally not televised live domestically, primarily to help protect attendances and atmosphere throughout English football, including the lower leagues and non-league games.

Commercially, that might appear strange.

Culturally, it helps explain why the product remains so valuable.

Packed away ends, pubs before kick-off, old rivalries, grounds embedded within towns and cities, winter evenings under floodlights and generations standing or sitting alongside one another are all part of what overseas broadcasters are really buying.

Globalisation has not destroyed the English identity of the Premier League.

It has made that identity more valuable.

There are other natural advantages. The English language travels easily. British kick-off times work across several important television markets. Decades of migration created football communities and club loyalties far beyond Britain, while modern travel now brings supporters in the opposite direction.

The Premier League estimates that 1.1 million international fans visited the UK in 2023/24, contributing more than £1 billion in gross value added to the British economy.

People no longer simply watch English football abroad.

Increasingly, they travel to England to experience it.

The Paradox That Keeps Working

That is ultimately the secret of the Premier League.

It is global because it remains recognisably English.

It is enormously wealthy because its biggest clubs possess extraordinary worldwide value, yet much of its central income is shared to strengthen the competition around them.

It recruits players and managers from across the planet, yet still relies upon local supporters to create the atmosphere television cannot manufacture.

And Liverpool and Manchester United remain central to that equation. Their histories, rivalries and enormous international audiences continue to introduce new generations to English football.

But when those supporters switch on, they are not buying two superclubs in isolation.

They are buying an ecosystem: Arsenal and Manchester City chasing championships; Chelsea rebuilding; Newcastle and Aston Villa challenging the established order; newly promoted clubs attempting to survive; packed stadiums; relegation battles; local rivalries and the constant possibility that the expected result might not happen.

The Premier League began in 1992 as an ambitious commercial breakaway.

Thirty-four years later, it has become something much harder to replicate: a global entertainment business whose greatest asset remains the football culture from which it came.

And as another season gets underway, there is little evidence that the world is losing interest.