adminLONDON. — In the multi-billion dollar English football industry, they are the movers and the shakers and, according to The Daily Telegraph, they are the five most influential people in the country’s game.
Richard Scudamore
With money comes power and no one running English football controls more of it than Scudamore. When the 57-year-old became chief executive of the Premier League in 1999, its television deals were worth just over £10m for every club. In the last rights auction 18 months ago, Sky Sports alone paid more than £10m per game.
No one has been more responsible for the staggering financial success of the world’s richest league than Scudamore, who even made the abolition of Sky’s monopoly on the rights work in his favour by creating one of the most fiendish auction processes in sport.
As the value of those rights have grown, so has the influence of Scudamore, who effectively administers the process by which money is redistributed both within and beyond the game.
Pep Guardiola
Not just a man, but a movement. His original 2008-2009 tiki-taka tactical masterpiece, with which he swept all before him in his rookie managerial season at Barcelona, is probably at its 3.0 stage, developed into a different system for different kinds of players.
Guardiola has proved no less beguiling with Manchester City’s underachieving superstars. He is football’s emeritus professor for hire serving three-year tenures and always interesting even if he was unable to bring the Champions League to Bayern Munich in his time there.
He is an ascetic type, tortured, obsessive and while by no means cheap to hire, the kind of man who does not waste his precious time on commercial endorsements.
English football feels like the last frontier for this man to conquer. The question then will be whether he can win City their first Champions League. On top of that, his suiting continues to be of the very highest order.
Jorge Mendes
The man whose fortunes have followed the upward trajectory of his first significant client, Jose Mourinho, is routinely referred to as a super-agent. But that soubriquet does little to illuminate the extent of the Portuguese’s power, which now stretches way beyond mere contract negotiations.
True, he accrued more than £30 million in fees from English clubs in the summer transfer window of 2014 alone, organising deals involving his clients Diego Costa, Angel Di María and Elaquim Mangala. But this is a man who is now so widely connected, with clients in every sphere of the game, that he can now not merely plot the career path of his clients, he can dictate it.
Jose Mourinho
One of the most high-profile, head-line grabbing, successful, controversial, charismatic, quotable and recognisable figures in football.
Mourinho changed the landscape of the Premier League when he arrived at Chelsea in 2004 — “I am a special one” — and his influence has reverberated ever since.
Eventually returning to England he re-captured the title for Chelsea and suffered one of the most spectacular and ignominious departures — for the second time — as he was sacked last year with the club going into meltdown.
Now at Manchester United, indisputably the biggest club in England, he has the task of reviving their fortunes and has already broken the world transfer record to bring Paul Pogba back to the club for £89 million.
Mourinho has an astonishing record of serial achievement, winning the league in his native Portugal, England, Italy and Spain and then England again while twice winning the Champions League — although the last time was six years ago.
Wherever he goes and whatever he says he is box office and although his influence on what happens in terms of matches and results is diminishing younger, more dynamic managers such as Pep Guardiola have overtaken him — he is an incredible force in football, with a magnetism and a significant commercial value, and one who can never be ignored.
Roman Abramovich
Even if you don’t support Chelsea, even if you have never been to Stamford Bridge, Abramovich has probably had a profound influence on your club. He is the reason your owner is a billionaire and not a millionaire.
He is the reason super-agents are running riot.
He is the reason Arsène Wenger hasn’t won the title in more than a decade.
When you look at the vast, grotesque edifice of English football in the 21st century, Abramovich’s fingers are all over the blueprints.
But this isn’t a lifetime achievement award. It’s not so much about what he’s done, as what he still might do.
Not yet 50, Abramovich could conceivably remain in situ for a generation or more.
He could get bored of waiting for Antonio Conte to tinker with the defence and launch another outrageous spending spree that would remake the economy of the sport overnight.
Because he hardly ever speaks in public, fortifying himself with a phalanx of unquestioningly loyal advisers, it is impossible to know for sure.
As Leonardo da Vinci said, nothing strengthens authority so much as silence. — Daily Telegraph.
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