Dyke's FA Commission is a consequence of his entire career.

Here's Marcus Stead's fascinating chronicle on the formation of the Premier League. Greg Dyke's pivotal role in it and the FA Commission, which is a consequence of its runaway success. 

When the new FA chairman Greg Dyke announced his masterplan for England to win the World Cup in 2022, he effectively admitted what we’ve all known for years: The FA and the Premier League have wholly different objectives.

The priority of Premier League clubs is, depending on their status, to win the league, qualify for Europe, or avoid relegation. Developing a pool of players for England selection doesn’t really feature in their plans at all. 

What isn’t so well-known is the enormous role Dyke played in the creation of the Premier League in the early 1990s. He didn’t realise it at the time, but he created the monster that is now standing in the way of the England team’s development. 

There are plenty of reasons to welcome Dyke’s appointment as chairman, and his CV makes for interesting reading. He is a man who was nothing special at school, and left with just one A-level, a grade E in combined mathematics. Even this came as a surprise. Dyke’s 20s were largely frustrating and unrewarding years and it was only at the age of 30, when his life hit rock bottom, that he took his first job in television, as a lowly researcher at LWT. 

His drive, enthusiasm and intelligence saw him rise rapidly through the ranks, and within a few short years he was in charge of ‘The Six O’Clock Show’, one of LWT’s flagship programmes inside London. It wasn’t long before Dyke was appointed Director of Programming at ailing breakfast station TV-AM, where his populist touch helped transform its fortunes following a disastrous start. From there he became Director of Programmes at TVS. 

After a few years, he was back at LWT in the same role, which, under the rather complex ITV structure at the time, included the title Chairman of ITV Sport. 

Dyke understood that society, and indeed the television landscape, was changing rapidly. He realised that he needed to move away from general magazine sports programmes and instead focus on live events. He also wanted to take ITV Sport upmarket, along with other areas of the channel’s output. 

British wrestling was dropped, and the money saved was invested in boxing. Also for the chop were darts, bowls and gymnastics, which saved him around £1.5 million per year. Live football was pivotal to his strategy, however, he rightly realised that the days of the BBC and ITV effectively operating a cartel were coming to an end. Dyke knew that the new pay TV satellite broadcaster, BSB, was keen to grab the rights to live top-flight football, and was willing to pay far more than the BBC and ITV had done under previous deals. 

BSB had already been networking with the Football League with a view to obtaining the rights, and Dyke had to come up with a strategy. Dyke sought advice from Trevor East, the Deputy Head of Sport at Thames Television, who was a football specialist, having previously been a board member at his beloved Derby County, and a canny operator. 

Dyke asked East who he could talk to ‘off the record’ and he suggested David Dein, the Deputy Chairman of Arsenal and a member of the Football League management committee. The three of them met at a Japanese restaurant, where Dyke and Dein struck up a close friendship that lasts to this day. Both sides had something to gain from this arrangement. Dein’s view was very clear: The viewing public wanted to watch the big clubs, so those clubs should get the bulk of the TV money, which, until that point, had been split between the 92 league clubs. 

The three of them came up with a plan. They would go directly to the big five clubs of the day – Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester United, Tottenham Hotspur and Everton, and offer them a million pounds a year for the exclusive rights to broadcast their home matches. To put things into perspective, the previous deal was worth £3.1 million a year in total, half of which was spread equally between the First Division clubs, with the rest going to clubs in the lower divisions. Certain factors helped Dyke’s cause, such as the fact that Philip Carter of Everton was Chairman of the Football League at the time. 

Dyke took John Bromley, the late Head of Sport at ITV and technically his superior to the first of a series of meetings, but Bromley was uneasy about a side deal being done, so Dyke simply didn’t invite him to future meetings. At the second meeting, they decided to extend the initial group of five to include five more clubs who would receive a lesser amount, but still substantially more than they received under previous deals: West Ham, Newcastle United, Aston Villa, Nottingham Forest, and Sheffield Wednesday. Dyke’s logic was that with these ten clubs on board, dubbed the ITV Superleague, the Football League could then sell the rights to the rest of the league to BSB, or whoever they liked, but without the big clubs, these rights wouldn’t be worth much. 

In response, Football League officials obtained a High Court injunction preventing the ‘big ten’ from signing a separate contract with ITV. BSB, by now operating a joint bid with the BBC, upped its offer, and so did Dyke, encouraged by Dein. BSB and the BBC later withdrew amid angry outbursts of ‘negotiation by auction'. 

Dyke and ITV had won. They reached an agreement to pay the Football League £11 million for 21 live matches, largely from Division One but also including the latter stages of the League Cup, to be broadcast mostly on Sunday afternoons. Meanwhile, BSB and the BBC did a deal with the FA for the rights to the FA Cup and England internationals, but the reality was that for the next four years, there would be no Match of the Day on Saturday nights, except on FA Cup weekends. By the standards of the time, ITV’s coverage, branded ‘The Match’ was innovative and exciting, with computer graphics and more cameras in the ground than before. However, by the standards of today, it would be considered second rate. 

The contract permitted far fewer live matches than there were rounds of fixtures. They had unlimited access to highlights, with a great deal more flexibility than broadcasters have today, but they chose not to use them at network level. Some ITV regions, especially Granada and Yorkshire, showed fairly regular Saturday evening or Sunday lunchtime highlights of the teams in their areas, but viewers in regions with no top flight teams went without highlights at all. 

The goals from the First Division were usually crammed into the half-time interval of the Sunday live match, or shown on Saint and Greavsie the following Saturday lunchtime. What’s more, ‘The Match’ only came on air five minutes before kick-off and they didn’t hang around for too long after the final whistle, because it would be time for ‘Bullseye’. 

Typically, there would be no coverage of the first few weeks of the season, and one year they didn’t bother at all until the clocks went back at the end of October, as Dyke claimed that people would be in their gardens on Sunday afternoons until then. It would be harsh to judge Dyke on these shortcomings. Football was in the doldrums during this period, and it’s worth remembering that the BBC had suspended regular Saturday night highlights not long beforehand, and put NBA basketball on in its place. In comparison to what had gone before, Dyke and ‘The Match’ were a force for good. 

There were enormous ramifications from this deal within the Football League. The lower league clubs were angry that they’d been cut out of the new deal and took steps that would later do them no favours. They got together and removed Phil Carter as the League’s Chairman and forced David Dein off the management committee This was a real game changer for when the rights next came up for renewal. 

By the autumn of 1991, it was time for Dyke and East to start thinking about a new deal. They contacted Dein, and arranged a dinner for the ‘big five’ clubs, to be hosted by Dyke in the hospitality suite on the 18th floor of the LWT building on London’s South Bank. 

Most of the people present were the same as four years earlier, and unsurprisingly, Dyke and Dein had discussed tactics in advance. Dyke opened by saying that he thought it unlikely that they could do another deal with the Football League negotiators that would be as favourable to the big clubs as the last one. He was undoubtedly right about that. 

Dyke told them that they had a choice: take less money, because the total was going to be spread between more clubs, or take radical action and break away from the Football League. 

This was a no-brainer for those present. They all resented the way Carter and Dein had been treated by the Football League, and supported the breakaway. Greg Dyke had effectively created the Premier League. Things moved very quickly in the months that followed. The chairmen agreed that if they were to succeed, they needed to get the FA on side. 

There was no love lost between the FA and the Football League in those days, therefore doing this wasn’t especially difficult. There was just one problem: By this stage, BSB had merged with Sky to form BSkyB, and ITV would be up against Rupert Murdoch and his money as they bid for the rights. East warned Dyke not to be complacent. 

Having the ‘big five’ on board wasn’t enough, and he needed to spend more time talking to the smaller top flight clubs. Dyke didn’t take East seriously enough. He wasn’t the sort of man who enjoyed making polite small talk in a bid to get people on side. He thought that because his strategy of having the ‘big five’ on board had worked four years earlier, it would work again. He had underestimated the sheer scale of Murdoch’s ambitions, or the depth of his pockets. 

Dyke had lunch at Langan’s with Sam Chisholm, the brash, mouthy Chief Executive of BSkyB, a New Zealander who was admired and loathed in equal measure. Murdoch had brought him in to save the company, and Chisholm claimed that what he was about to say to Dyke had come from the man himself. 

Using some rather crude language, Chisholm suggested that he and Dyke get together and share the rights to the new Premier League, to keep one another’s bidding costs down if nothing else. Dyke laughed at Chisholm’s suggestion, and in doing so had made a vital miscalculation. He assumed that Chisholm’s offer to work together was a sign of weakness on BSkyB’s part, and that ITV was in prime position to claim exclusivity as a result. How wrong he was. Chisholm went to Will Wyatt, the managing director of BBC Television, and suggested a partnership – the BBC’s respectability and BSkyB’s money, to give Sky exclusive live rights and the return of weekly highlights on the BBC. 

The BBC offered around £20 million per year, on the condition that ITV didn’t get live rights. Wyatt was acting with the blessing of the late BBC Chairman Marmaduke Hussey, a former chairman of Times Newspapers who knew Murdoch well, and had already discussed the issue with him. Hussey had certainly gone well outside his remit as BBC Chairman in discussing football contracts in the first place, but it wouldn’t be long before all sides were bending the rules as bidding for the ‘big prize’ became more aggressive. 

Crucially, around this time Irving Scholar had sold Spurs to Alan Sugar, whose Amstrad firm was the sole manufacturer of Sky’s dishes in those days. Scholar was an ITV man, and for obvious reasons, Sugar was in the BSkyB camp. 

Some time earlier, Rick Parry, the Premier League’s Chief Executive, had shaken hands with East at a boxing match, informally agreeing a deal which would lead to ITV getting the contract. 

In the intervening period, Parry had been heavily courted by all sides. Parry then insisted on a proper tendering process, where broadcasters would submit their best and final bids by a certain time, and the merits of each bid would be discussed at the meeting of the chairmen within a matter of days. 

In the intervening period, Dyke received intelligence from the Premier League that he was in danger of losing. The rules had been broken, and the gloves were off. Dyke and East worked all through the Sunday night before the meeting at the Royal Lancaster Hotel the following day. They hit the clubs with a new offer, which East delivered personally to each club representative. A few minutes after the meeting started, Sugar came rushing out of the meeting and made a call to Chisholm from a public phone cubicle, and East overheard him say ‘You’ve got to blow them out of the water’. 

What Sugar didn’t know at the time is that Parry had already made Chisholm aware of the offer. Chisholm got the message that he didn’t need to just offer a million pounds more than ITV, it needed to be considerably bigger, and beyond the reach of their competitors. Sure enough, a new bid from BSkyB arrived. The BSkyB/BBC bid saw BSkyB pay £190 million for five years for exclusive live rights, with the BBC paying around £100 million over the same period for highlights. 

Dyke was deeply unhappy with the nature of BBC’s involvement in the deal, which he thought was a consequence of Murdoch’s close relationship with Hussey. What’s more, without the BBC’s money, ITV’s bid was higher. 

As the meeting of chairman convened, Sugar, to his credit, declared his conflict of interests, and suggested that he should abstain from the vote. Although David Dein and Martin Edwards of Manchester United agreed that Sugar should abstain, most of the smaller clubs believed he should be allowed to vote. 

In other words, Dyke hadn’t done enough to try to get them on side, and he should have taken greater notice of East’s earlier warning. It has often been said that Sugar’s vote was crucial in swinging the contract ITV’s way, but this isn’t entirely true. 

The chairman of Nottingham Forest had promised to support ITV, but he had sent his office secretary to the meeting on his behalf, because no one else was available. That vote in favour of BSkyB/BBC turned out to be crucial, and the contract was theirs. 

A subsequent High Court challenge by ITV came to nothing. This whole process leaves is with plenty of ‘what ifs’: What if Dyke had taken East’s warning more seriously and had done more to get the smaller Premier League clubs on side? What if Dyke had taken advantage of his meeting with Chisholm and they’d come to an arrangement where ITV and BSkyB could share rights? What if the Nottingham Forest chairman had turned up and the vote had swung ITV’s way regardless? 

We will never know the answer for sure. Premier League football was, and still is, BSkyB’s flagship product. Chisholm insists the company would have survived without it, albeit with some difficulty. Plenty of others disagreed. Murdoch had taken a massive gamble by setting up BSkyB, and it’s quite possible its failure would have had wider ramifications for his media empire. 

Or maybe not. 

If BSkyB had sunk, would Premier League rights be sold for the kind of sums they are today? Actually, I suspect they probably would, as the likes of Al Jazeera or the Disney-backed ESPN would have made a substantial entry into the UK market, and in terms of money and the overall level of coverage, we would be more-or-less where we are now, although it’s possible one live match per week would still be shown on free-to-air TV. 

What is indisputable is Dyke’s enormous role in creating the Premier League in the first place. Now, more than 20 years later, this has come back to haunt him. He created a monster he cannot destroy. 

Make no mistake, bringing players through for England selection is not a priority for any Premier League club. When signing players, they act in their own best interests. It is as simple as that. They feel no emotional or moral obligation to make Greg Dyke or Roy Hodgson’s lives any easier, or to help England win the World Cup. 

At his recent news conference, Dyke’s reputation as a straight-talker took a bit of a battering with his use of meaningless business clichés such as ‘going forward’ (you can’t plan for the past, Mr Dyke!). He also referred to ‘challenges’ whereas a real straight-talker would have said ‘problems’, when referring to foreign players blocking the playing opportunities for English youngsters. 

During the press conference, Dyke announced that he was setting up and chairing an FA Commission that would ask three simple questions: 

1. Why has this happened?

2. What could be done about it? 

3. How, if possible, can these changes actually be made? 

We all know the answer to question one, but Dyke hits a major stumbling block with his second and third questions. 

There is no point whatsoever in placing a restriction on the number of foreign players in any squad for as long as Britain is in the European Union. One of the key principles of EU membership is the free movement of citizens throughout the union to live and work. 

For his entire adult life, Dyke has belonged to, and supported organisations that believe in Britain’s continued membership of the EU. He was a member of the Labour Party for decades, and, at various times, was a close associate of senior europhile members of the New Labour project, including Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson. 

When he fell out with New Labour over the Hutton Report, he soon joined the even more pro-EU Liberal Democrats. He even donated £10,000 to the party to help them fight the 2005 general election. During his time as Director General of the BBC, he did absolutely nothing to put right the institutional pro-EU bias that shone through on their TV and radio bulletins, something his successor, Mark Thompson, eventually admitted was a problem that needed addressing. 

Unless Dyke or anybody else is willing to advocate Britain’s withdrawal from the EU, the debate about limiting non-English players is utterly futile. I suspect he already knows this. 

The other thing Dyke really needs to grasp is that this horse has already well and truly bolted. Just seven of the 20 Premier League clubs are English-owned. Only four of the managers are English. Even if a club is English-owned and English-managed, their priority is the club’s progress, not that of the England team. Let’s just imagine for a moment that Dyke has a massive change of heart and spearheads a successful campaign to get Britain out of the EU. Does he really imagine that all the Premier League club owners and managers will then sit around a table with him and devise a meaningful strategy to help England win the 2022 World Cup? It is far, far too late to do anything about this. 

The Commission is due to report in early 2014, and I’m willing to hazard a guess at what its conclusions will be: 

There is a lack of qualified coaches at youth level; the quality of football coaching in schools is unacceptably low; there is too much emphasis on winning matches and too little on developing skills with children; clubs are too quick to dismiss English youngsters from their academies; children in this country spend far too little time playing football with their mates these days, due to cultural changes over the last 30 years or so. 

All this is very true, but the questions I have asked are far bigger. The Premier League is Greg Dyke’s Frankenstein. It was largely his creation, and now the beast is completely beyond his control. 

Pep talk on Premier League was a Bayern bluff

Pep Guardiola’s near-theatrical “I want to manage in the Premier League” gush turned out to be the most elaborate "come and get me plea" in the electronic media age.

Pep flirted with England's elite - then signed for Bayern!

The former Barcelona boss, on sabbatical after stepping down at Camp Nou last season said, "As a player I couldn't realise my dream to play in England. But I hope in the future, I have a challenge to be a coach or a manager there."

He added: "It is unique to play in that league. I want to feel the supporters, the environment, the media and the style of the players and everything.

But in the very same day as those words were trumpeted through press and social media, Guardiola agreed terms with German giants, Bayern Munich. So much for feeling the English game then.

Pep guided the Catalan giants to an incredible haul of 14 trophies in four seasons. Auf wiedersehen, Pep!

Then again, Bayern's a prudent and sober choice for someone of Pep's experience and calibre because they resemble his old club, Barcelona in many ways:

Bayern is 82% owned by the fans in a setup similar to that of the Catalan giants and like Barca, they're one of the big two clubs at home.

They also have an enviable youth policy and a desire from the cream of the crop to play for them. It's a hunger shared by just a handful of the world's top clubs.

They're also perennial and viable Champions League performers and sign players from other domestic clubs.

All of these similarities will aid Guardiola to repeat his stellar achievements in the Bundesliga and beyond.

He's spent time away with his family in New York, sampling life and culture in a completely new environment. Despite the growth of the MLS, Manhattan remains one city where Pep can remain almost anonymous in the crowd.

But in signing for the Bavarians, he's ready to step back into the limelight.

Meanwhile, we all know what Jose thinks of English football. The ex-Chelsea boss has a long-held desire to return to these shores when his time at Real Madrid comes to an end.

Jose is open to an English return

England and Spain have been vying toe to toe to be regarded as the best league in the world for the last decade. Perhaps Spain have nosed ahead the last couple of seasons if the FIFA Ballon d’Or awards are a barometer.

But I believe English football is about enter another golden era. Television rights in this country are up 70% from next season – which means while wages are being controlled for lesser talent, English clubs will be able to top dollar and premium for real (or perhaps Real) talent.

Don’t be surprised if the brain drain of managers to England isn’t matched by Latin stars choosing Wigan on a wet Wednesday night too.

Germany's grabbed a superstar coach - but while the Bundesliga's among the most competitive of European leagues, only England has the financial clout to attract a basket of top names.

You heard it here first: English club football is about to enter a period of renewed dominance - and will leave even Spain - and Germany in its wake.

Is Appleton really Blackburn's Messiah?

Jobsite! It's Appleton's favourite website

As Blackburn Rovers appoint Michael Appleton as their new boss, where's this hyperactive game of managerial musical chairs taking us? 

Blackpool granted him permission to speak to Rovers - despite only being at Bloomfield Road two months.

Before that, he spent 10 minutes at Portsmouth and had a quick trip round West Bromwich Albion on the coaching staff.

Fans on Stadium Tours get more accustomed to the surroundings!

Collecting a CV quicker than you get your holiday snaps developed is a symptom of trigger happy chairmen's impatience. They're sacking bosses because they’re perceived not to be big enough characters. It used to just be about getting results. Now bosses get boned because they’re not more famous.

Stepping into that vacuum is someone like Michael Appleton, highly rated in the game largely because he’s not got anything wrong yet – because he's not done much except drive around the country signing coaching contracts.

Sean O'Driscoll left Nottingham Forest on the edge of the Championship play-offs having beaten Leeds 4-2 - and replaced by Alex McLeish. Flippin' Eck, you might say!

He's got more tracksuits than Sports Direct

The former Birmingham and Aston Villa boss is supposed to be more capable of dealing with the rigours of the January transfer window.

Next thing, Forest get beaten 3-2 at home by Oldham, a team further down the Football League and the decision looks cack-handed to say the least.

The Championship's jittery because owners and chairmen all realise the riches of the newly-capitalised Premier League would provide their club with even bigger cash injections than before. Television revenues are set to increase by a whopping 70%.

Leeds United and Nottingham Forest have both changed ownership because of it and the inexperience of the new custodians makes the manager's life even more precarious than it was before.

So as Rovers sign up Appleton, they seem perfect bedfellows. Neither has a gameplan.

Black Hole in Alan Hansen's education

Why are we forced to watch Alan Hansen on our screens as a Match Of The Day pundit?

Kick It Out, Kick Him Out!

I can't bear him anymore: to me, he represents the blunt, outdated instrument the BBC has become in these post Credit Crunch years. Not for profit; not for us either.

I'm of a certain vintage so I remember him as a player, but millions of under-40's don't. Is there someone else Auntie could find with a more contemporaneous spin on the game? Point of information: Hansen retired from football before the Premier League years.

Yes, he won nine league titles with Liverpool, but he wasn't considered good enough to be part of Scotland's World Cup squads either in 1982 and 1986. He was a good club player in a brilliant team. A sort of 80's Steve Bruce.

Lazy and complacent, Hansen's long-institutionalised body language screams of the waged and entitled. I mean, what does he do in between Match Of The Days to justify his vast £1.5m salary a year? It looks like very little to me.

But he stooped to a new low when discussing the hot topic of racism in the game: he outed himself as an equally culpable ignoranamus that our Beautiful Game is populated with at the moment.

‘If you look at 25 or 30 years ago it was probably in a bad way - not as bad as some of the other nations on the Continent - but certainly there is always, always room for improvement.’ said the 56-year-old. Starting in the Match Of The Day production offices after the show, I say.

Lee Dixon, on set with him, visibly squirmed as Hansen added, ‘I think there’s a lot of coloured players in all the major teams and there are lots of coloured players who are probably the best in the Premier League.

Hansen and Lawro chew the footy fat.

"It's a generational thing", I'm told. "Older people I know would use the coloured word". Maybe.

But here is a so-called professional broadcaster, someone who operates in a metropolitan world of all peoples. Has he not embraced any of the zeitgeist of what's acceptable?

He's specialised in the nothing special for years: the BBC is a non-profit-making company; Sky Sports is - and that's no more clearly demonstrated in the differences between the quality of the pundits they use on their respective outputs.

For all Andy Gray's faults, he was a hard-working, incisive pundit, schooled by TV executives to feed us football insight we weren't aware of before. Jamie Redknapp and Gary Neville are as credible and interesting as anyone on sports telly these days.

Hansen's gone from asset to liability in record time. While Hansen's doubtless got some columns of support; (you can't have been on-air for that long without any), I can't imagine any justification for renewal of his contract on anything like the terms he enjoys at the moment.

And I'd prefer him gone.  

Click here for the current Top Story Soccermongery's all about your feedback, so write away, right away!

It's Time To Say, "Arise, Sir Jimmy Hill"

By MARCUS STEAD: Soccermongery is often the platform for the outrageous statement. What about this one!

The summer of 2000 was one of the most important periods of my life. This was the time when I was sitting my GCSE exams, an experience I’m glad to say I’ll never have to go through again.

I can remember the day of my first exam very well. Nearly 200 of us entered the school hall, and had been allocated a very old, wobbly wooden desk each, that had surely out-lived our sixteen years. I went to take my place, which would be my second home in the gruelling few weeks that lay ahead.

No sooner had I sat down than I noticed a piece of graffiti on the top of the desk that read in huge capital letters, “JIMMY HILL IS MY HERO”. I tried very hard not to laugh out loud - this wasn’t the time or the place, but it’s fair to say I came pretty close to being disqualified from my exams before they had even started. Just think, my life could’ve taken a completely different course if one of the invigilators had looked at me during that moment.
Yet it occurred to me that those words could have been inscribed several decades earlier. Certainly, the desk dated back to the 1960s (it had an inkwell), but it was a testimony to just how long the great man had been involved with the game.

Of course, Mr Hill is a national figure of fun, and the graffiti was undoubtedly intended as sarcasm, but if you take the time to look beyond the huge chin and daft bow ties, you find a man who has made an extraordinary contribution to the game in so many different capacities.

His playing career saw him make more than 300 appearances for Fulham, the most memorable of which saw him score five goals against Doncaster Rovers, but his achievements as a player pale in comparison to everything he has accomplished off the field that helped change the game for the better in so many ways.

In 1957, he became the chairman of the Professional Footballers Association, and campaigned for the abolition of the £20-per-week maximum wage. He headed an excellent campaign that was ultimately successful. It’s easy to scoff at the excesses of the Premier League, but if this campaign had failed all those decades ago, there would surely have been an exodus of talent away from the English league to just about anywhere. The consequences for the national game would have been devastating.

Even if he had faded from the public eye at this stage, the modern game would still owe him a huge debt of gratitude, but this was to be only the beginning of his contribution to matters off-the-pitch.

His spell as manager of Coventry City between 1961 and 1967 saw the team promoted from the third tier to the top flight, but that only tells part of the story. Once again, he was way ahead of his time. With the support of the club chairman, Derrick Robbins, he insisted that two sides of the Highfield Road stadium were completely rebuilt. He was also responsible for the first proper match day programme, and arranged for pre-match entertainment.

These changes may sound small by the standards of today, but he understood that this was a period when cinema, theatre and other forms of entertainment were becoming increasingly affordable for ordinary people, and football had to work harder to maintain the fans’ loyalty.
When he left the club in 1967, he moved to a role that would see him make yet more revolutionary changes to the way we watch football.

He took a job as Head of Sport at London Weekend Television, where he helped develop the legendary World of Sport, and persuaded Brian Moore to make the switch to television for the launch of The Big Match. Until this point, football on TV had always been rather earnest, worthy and slightly po-faced. The double act of Jimmy and Brian Moore changed all that, adding a touch of razzmatazz and fun to proceedings.

The challenge ITV faces when covering major international tournaments is much the same now as it was at the 1970 World Cup. The main challenge was, and is, to give the viewer a reason to put up with the adverts and choose their coverage over that of the commercial-free BBC. On this front, Jimmy worked his magic once again, when he assembled the first panel of analysts, carefully chosen because of their willingness to speak their minds and not hold back.

For a month in the summer of 1970, ITV viewers were treated to late-night football highlights in the company of “The Midnight Cowboys” consisting of Malcolm Allison, Bob McNab, Pat Crerand, Derek Dougan and several others, who provided entertaining and forthright analysis of the day’s action. It’s hard to imagine a set-up like this existing now, in an era when broadcasters are keen to stay on the right side of the governing bodies, and the pundits themselves don’t want to upset their friends in the game. This remains the only time ITV have beaten the BBC in the ratings at a major summer tournament.

Jimmy jumped ship to the BBC a few years later, and became the face of Match of the Day. Those of us who weren’t around at the time have recently been given the chance to enjoy those programmes on ESPN Classic. I don’t normally appreciate being lectured at in a schoolmasterly fashion, but his precise, sharp and to-the-point analysis of the matches they covered was refreshingly blunt.

He combined his broadcasting commitments with several directorships, which started with his return to Coventry City in 1975. In the last game of the 1976/77 season, he is said to have made Coventry City vs Bristol City kick off ten minutes late, thereby allowing them to know how their relegation rivals Sunderland were doing at Everton. Sunderland eventually lost the game 2-0. Both teams knew all they had to do to stay up was pass the ball around, and the final ten minutes descended into farce, with nobody making any effort at all to try and score.

Many Sunderland fans still haven’t forgiven him for this, as was evident when he attended their match against Fulham at Craven Cottage just last year, and needed a police escort to ensure his safety.

But was this really such a crime? Maybe there really was serious crowd congestion outside Highfield Road. If we want to make the final day of the season truly fair, maybe all TV, radio and telecommunication signals inside every football ground should be blocked, to stop teams playing for draws if they know an important fixture at another ground is heading for an extremely one-sided result.

Of course, that could never happen, but you know what I’m getting at.

In 1981 came more proof that he was an innovator, a man well ahead of his time. He turned Highfield Road into an all-seater stadium, on the grounds of safety and fan comfort. However, there was a backlash from the supporters, and after Millwall fans ripped out much of the seating, he reluctantly backed down and re-introduced terracing. Hull City fans hoping for a repeat of that precedent shouldn’t hold their breath. Jimmy was once again way ahead of everybody else, and after a pretty miserable decade for football, all-seater stadia became the norm.

Later that decade, he saved his beloved Fulham from extinction, before having the wisdom to sell up when someone with serious financial clout could lead them back to the top flight for the first time in three decades.

By the late 1980s, the television viewer demanded a more slick presentation style, and Des Lynam was installed as presenter of Match of the Day. Jimmy was moved to the role of analyst, where he formed a highly entertaining and much under-rated double act with Terry Venables. It appeared as though they couldn’t stand each other, but away from the cameras, nothing could have been further from the truth. The viewers loved it.

In his most recent role as presenter of the Sunday Supplement on Sky Sports, he often talked about how it would be a good idea to get more former players to become referees. This argument holds a lot of merit, and is likely to gain huge amounts of support from players and managers in the years ahead.

Yes, some people think he preaches too much, and he’s always been prone to the odd daft comment. But the real Jimmy Hill is an innovator, a maverick, and a rebel who repeatedly stood up to the men in blazers. Everyone in football, whether a player, manager, media personality and even ordinary fans owe him a huge debt of gratitude.

Sir Alex Ferguson and Sir Bobby Robson are both worthy recipients of their knighthoods, and it’s now time to add Sir Jimmy to that list.
Let us show him our appreciation for everything he has done for the game while he is with us to enjoy it. Football, and even the nation as a whole, would be in a far better state if there were more people around like him.

Also on Soccermongery: Jonny's TV Guide to watching Football on TV... er... nil-nil, Jeff! and VIDEO: McClaren's mystery Dutch accent!
Soccermongery's all about your feedback, so write away, right away!