• The oldest documented football club in Britain is Sheffield FC, founded in 1857; the world’s oldest professional football club is Britain’s Nott County, founded in 1862, and is still playing today in the English League Division 2; and that football has been played in some form or another in Britain since medieval times.
  
  
• English player David Beckham is one of the most commercially valuable players in the world, having played with a number of football’s leading clubs and signed numerous lucrative endorsement deals; he is thought to earn around £30 million each year.
  
  
• Together, Celtic and Rangers have been identified as contributing more than £120 million worth of economic activity to Glasgow each season.
  
  
• Owners of British football clubs come from across the world and include: George Gillett and Tom Hicks (USA – owners of Liverpool); Roman Abramovich (Russia – owner of Chelsea); the Al-Nahyan family (Abu Dhabi – owners of Manchester City); and Vladimir Romanov (Lithuania – owner of Heart of Midlothian).
  
  
• Demand for tickets to watch the Northern Ireland national teams regularly outstrips the supply of tickets available, and the Irish Football Association is therefore seeking to build a new national team stadium.
  
  
• Some of the world’s biggest brands sponsor either the shirts or the stadiums of British football clubs. Big names involved include Emirates Airlines, Samsung, Ricoh, Carlsberg, Chang and Saudi Telecom.
  
  
• Britain is home to three of the biggest football stadiums in the world: Wembley in London, Hampden Park in Glasgow and the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff; Hampden staged the 2002 Champions League Final and the 2007 UEFA Cup Final; Wembley is the focal point of England’s bid to host the 2018 World Cup; and the Millennium Stadium has a retractable roof.
  
  
• Manchester United is one of the biggest football clubs in the world and may have as many as 75 million fans across the world.  In the recent Deloitte Annual Rich List Manchester United was in second place with approximately £250 million worth of annual revenues.
  
  
• It is thought that, when Manchester City and Everton played each other in 2003, more than 300,000 million Chinese viewers tuned into watch the game.

If these ten facts about British football have grabbed your attention, then studying for a British Sport Management, or Business and Management, degree could be for you. The courses on offer across the country will help you get to grips with issues relating to players, sponsorships, governing bodies, broadcasters and stadiums, and prepare you for a career managing in sport.

There are lots of British football websites that you can look at to discover more about what is happening across Britain’s four leagues. A good starting point for anyone interested in general football stories is the BBC website:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/

Otherwise, the websites for each of the four British football associations provide further information:

English Football Association    

Irish Football Association   

Scottish Football Association   

Welsh Football Association    

Discover why you should study Sport Management in the UK

The British Council promotes the UK as a global centre for education, knowledge, skills and creativity, presenting opportunities that enable talent and ideas to be shared across national boundaries.

The British Council’s sport programme focuses on education through sport to promote cross-cultural relations

http://www.britishcouncil.org/sport.htm

and find out what it does in Thailand:

http://www.britishcouncil.org/thailand.htm