Word: premier
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...coalition led by his Fianna Fáil party has seen soaring economic growth, a doubling of national income and a plunge in the unemployment rate from 10% to 4.2%. "How do you do it, Bertie?" asked a jealous and frankly incredulous Tony Blair last October. The British premier, who came to power a month before Ahern and will soon step down, unmourned by many who once supported him, was closeted with his Irish counterpart in Scotland, hammering out the final details of the St. Andrews Agreement on Northern Ireland, when Ahern's press secretary delivered the results...
...move to the next stage of the deal - building a brand-new arena for the 115-year-old team. "Liverpool has a history that's at the very top," says Hicks, who pledges to "make sure we keep a great thing going great." Right now, in sports, the English Premier League is just about the definition of a great thing. Backed by wealthy investors like Hicks, and tapping into a huge fan base all over the world, Premier League clubs have struck gold. Teams in English football's top flight notched up around $2.5 billion in revenue last season, almost...
...that with a domestic game in the doldrums and top clubs impotent against Continental opposition, they needed a greater say over their own affairs - and the enhanced broadcast revenue they thought they could win. In 1992, England's top clubs walked out of the Football League to form the Premier League, a commercially independent alliance able to hammer out its own TV deals on behalf of all its teams...
...with only 20 clubs competing in the English league, average club takings are already more than in the NBA. There's more to come. For each of the three seasons of a new broadcast deal that begins later this year, domestic TV rights for the Premier League fetched $1.1 billion, compared with just $680 million for the deal that expires this summer. Taking Britain's smaller population into account, the League, under the new deal, will generate 50% more domestic broadcasting revenue per head than the NFL, and eight times that of the NBA, according to consultants Deloitte. Increasingly, that...
...face of it, there's still a stark difference in financial power the lower down the Premier League table you go. According to Deloitte's 2006 Annual Review of Football Finance, the top five earners in the 2004-05 season - Manchester United, Chelsea, Liverpool, Arsenal and Newcastle United - accounted for almost half of both revenue and salary costs. And though average club revenue hit $124 million in 2004-05, the ratio of revenue at the richest club to that of the poorest is 4.7:1, well over twice the NFL's rate and almost double the NBA's. While income...