Box of Broadcasts: Lord Sugar tackles football

For anyone old enough to remember, like me, Alan Sugar was the high-profile chairman of Tottenham Hotspur from 1991 to 2001. In this programme, Sugar trouble-shoots the Premiership with its enormous debt, with clubs facing an average financial losses of £20 million a year, massing a staggering debt of £3.3 bn in the league. As an example, 91% of West Ham’s turnover is spent on players’ wages. Listen to the inspirational story of former player Dave Whelan, the founder of JJB Sports, who bought Wigan Athletic about the spiralling wage bill, or Harry Redknapp who played at West Ham during their glory days but worked at a supermarket stacking shelves during the summer.
If you are a a member of staff or student at the University of Lincoln you should be able to view this programme. Box of Broadcasts has an amazing archive of tv and radio programmes ready to view or listen to. You can also create clips and embed the links, as I have done. Just go to the Portal > Library > E-Library > Box of Broadcasts and log on.

This recording is to be used only for non-commercial educational purposes under the terms of an ERA Licence. For terms of use and to find and record more programmes please visit BoB National.

Book of the month: The economics of football (2011)

Discussion about money and football has dominated the headlines since Murdoch’s Sky Sports cash injection into Premier League TV rights during the 90s. Likewise, there’s been a lot of student-led demand for football and business books lately, and one of our latest purchases, Dobson & Goddard’s 2011 popular eBook The economics of football offers academic economic insight into the ‘beautiful game’. There’s so much here for any business student interested in football, not only covering English football, but across the globe, including Germany and Brazil. If you want to learn about determining players’ salaries at the top flight, forecasting models for football match results, game theory and football games, the accumulative match day income of the ‘Big Four’, the much-debated phenomenon of referee behaviour at football matches, measuring managerial influence upon club performance, betting-odds, and of course, the economic impact of the World Cup mega-event, then access this book via the Library Catalogue (www.library.lincoln.ac.uk) search for the title.

Question: Which organisation investigated FIFA after a Panorama documentary exposed alleged bribes?