When the English Premier League announced plans to play a regular-season, competitve match on foreign soil — dubbed the “39th game” – there was almost unified outcry from the many factions involved in the English game.

Most newspapers and commentators attacked the move as indelible proof of the division’s growing greed and unbridled ambition to find consumers in every corner of the globe. The plan was ridiculed and then quietly dropped.

But for Richard Scudamore — the chief executive of the English Premier League — it wasn’t so much to do with avarice but, rather surprisingly for a league regarded as one of the most successful sporting franchises on the planet, survival.

“People think that it is inevitable that the world will throw itself at the Premier League,” he later told The London Times.

“We are competing in a fiercely competitive cultural marketplace…they [foreign markets] have still to decide which sports they are going to be interested in.”

There were no such anxieties with those heading basketball’s top division. Next March will see the NBA stage its first ever regular season games in London.

Source: CNN