The Premier League’s renewed hunt for a new chief executive is continuing to focus on the broadcasting industry, despite knockbacks from two leading TV figures, with several other top executives of major TV companies under consideration.
Darren Childs, the chief executive of UKTV, the owner of the Dave channel, and Richard Halton, the recently-departed chief executive of YouView, the TV service jointly owned by a number of the UK’s biggest TV and telecoms companies, are understood to be under consideration for a new list of candidates being drawn up.
Some major Premier League clubs had urged Gavin Patterson, 51, the chief executive of BT who steps down at the end of the month, to step forward but he did not apply for the role. Having not been involved in the process to date, he is not tainted by the politics of not being the first-choice candidate, which could offer an elegant solution for the Premier League if he were persuaded to change his mind.
The hunt for a replacement for Richard Scudamore was thrown into disarray at the end of last year when its first choice, Susanna Dinnage, a UK-based senior executive at the US pay-TV company Discovery, pulled out just weeks before she was meant to start the job.
The governing body had hoped to bounce back quickly by turning to second choice candidate, the BBC Studios chief executive, Tim Davie, but he also turned down their advances. The Premier League’s five-person recruitment panel, chaired by the Chelsea chairman, Bruce Buck, with executive search firm Spencer Stuart, is now starting to draw up a new list.
The Premier League is not looking for a direct replacement for Scudamore, who held the role of executive chairman, intending to follow best corporate practice and split the roles between a chief executive and a chairman.
The change in corporate structure means it is not in need of a direct replacement for Scudamore, who was said to have run the Premier League as something of a personal fiefdom. Instead, the requirement is for a seasoned executive able to handle footballing politics and, at times, intense public scrutiny.
Childs has run UKTV, which owns 10 paid and free TV channels as well as the on-demand service UKTV Play, since 2010 and has overseen a TV ratings surge that has driven profits from £29m to £91m. Previous roles include running the BBC’s international commercial channels, working for Sony’s European TV arm and eight years in Asia working for Rupert Murdoch’s Asian pay-TV operation. Halton has spent most of the past decade as the chief executive of YouView, the internet-connected TV service jointly owned by the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5, BT, TalkTalk and Arqiva, which is now in more than 3m UK homes.
Like Patterson, Childs and Halton would offer the appeal of a fast-track transitioning into the job. Halton, who dealt with the infamous “You’re fired” boardroom bust-up of the billionaires Lord Alan Sugar and Richard Desmond, finished at YouView at the end of last year. And Childs is expected to depart from UKTV in the coming months when its joint owners, the BBC and Discovery, complete a £1bn break up of the company.
In broadening the search, industry sources point to the experience, and convenient availability, of Dawn Airey, 58, who recently returned to the UK after running Getty Images in New York for three years. Airey built her career on a string of high-profile TV roles, including two stints at Channel 5, where she was famously quoted as saying its strategy was based on the three Fs: “films, football and fucking” , and top roles at ITV and Sky. She also spent two years at Yahoo as its top European executive. It is not known if Airey is on the new list of candidates.
Following the Scudamore era of huge increases in the value of TV rights every three years, there will be a difficult path to navigate as the economics of football rights change in the digital age. Last year, Sky paid £3.57bn to retain the lion’s share of the rights for Premier League matches from 2019-22, a 14% discount per game on its current deal.
The Premier League’s attempts to draw deep-pocketed Silicon Valley firms into bidding, to continue to drive rights inflation in the face of a dearth of new competition from traditional TV broadcasters, has not been considered overly successful.
Another significant factor will be dealing with the complex politics of factions within the 20-club Premier League with the big six: Manchester City, Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea and Tottenham, pushing for a bigger share of the rights revenues in recognition of their pulling power.
