dasfewfa: England's Goal Rush - TIMEUGG OnlineUGGS Kopen

YOU'LL NEVER QUEUE ALONE: Liverpool fans line up to buy team merchandise on a game day at Anfield in February ,UGG Online

Tweet Digg

On a flight back home to the U.S. in early February, Tom Hicks was passing the time with a dvd of the European Champions League football final of 2005. A ruthless trio of goals by AC Milan had looked to have killed the game before half-time, and Liverpool, Milan's opponents, were out of sorts. But the second half was a different story. The English team fought their way back into the game,UGGS Kopen, and Liverpool eventually snatched Europe's top club competition in a dramatic penalty shoot-out.

For Liverpool fans, celebrating their club's first European Cup for 21 years, the game was one for the ages. Reliving the spectacle at 35,000 feet, Hicks was entitled to think that he had even more invested in it. Hours earlier, the owner of the Dallas Stars ice hockey team and baseball's Texas Rangers had agreed to buy Liverpool for $430 million with his partner, George Gillett, the money behind the Montreal Canadiens hockey franchise. The two Americans beat out Dubai International Capital, which had offered $300 million for the club. The takeover is now complete, and Hicks and Gillett are set to 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 triple the level of a decade ago, making it the world's richest football league by a country mile. New owners are piling in: foreign investors have snapped up four clubs in the past year — Liverpool, Portsmouth, Aston Villa and West Ham United — to add to the three which already had non-British owners. The rush isn't over; in April, Stan Kroenke, owner of the Denver Nuggets basketball team and ice hockey's Colorado Avalanche,UGGS Outlet, increased his stake in Arsenal, of London, to more than 12%. The flood of money is paying dividends; three of the four semifinalists in this year's Champions League are Premier League clubs. With interest swelling among faraway fans in Asia and beyond, backers of the Premier League can look forward to "a much brighter future of growth," says Hicks.

If so, that would be one of the business world's more improbable turnarounds. Less than 20 years ago, English football was known more for rabid fans and decrepit stadiums than for the sort of classy crowd that fills the suites at the stadiums of Chelsea and Manchester United. How did the local game of the English working class become a global business? And can it stay on top?

Before English football could take over the world,UGG Kensington, it had to sort itself out. And just as Liverpool's change of ownership has come to epitomize the state of the Premier League now,Moncler Online, so its fortunes two decades ago demonstrated the depths to which the English game had plummeted. Though a powerhouse on the field — its teams were champions of Europe four times between 1977 and 1984 — Liverpool's fans had a reputation for being a dangerous disgrace. When some of them rioted at the 1985 European final in Brussels, 38 fans of the Italian team Juventus were killed. It would be five years before English teams were allowed to play again in European competitions. Back home, aging stadiums offered neither comfort nor safety; in 1989,Moncler Online, 96 Liverpool fans were crushed to death on an over-crowded terrace at the Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield. Financially, too, the game was a mess. Most top-flight team owners poured money into their local team in the hope of boosting their social standing, not its bottom line. Even Manchester United,UGG Kensington, English football's most successful team in the last decade, was led through much of the '60s and '70s by an enterprising local butcher. (Not so these days: U.S. tycoon Malcolm Glazer, owner of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers National Football League franchise, swallowed the club in 2005.)

But the 1990s brought change. The official report into the carnage at Hillsborough mandated that top grounds had to be all seated by mid-1994; the government even offered millions of pounds to help pay for reconstruction. Out went crumbling terracing; in came safer seating and improved facilities that made fans feel more like spectators than animals. And as the game began rebuilding its domestic appeal, a handful of chairmen with a sharper eye for profits made a bold move. For years, the top teams had threatened to split from England's four-tier, 120-year-old Football League,Piumini Moncler, claiming 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.
相关的主题文章：