Leading teams in the English Premier League remain keen on obtaining a larger proportion of centrally-sold commercial rights revenues, according to outgoing Liverpool chief executive Ian Ayre.
“There’s so much that so many leagues can learn from the Premier League,” he said, according to UK newspaper The Guardian. “There are still things to make better.
“I was supposedly very outspoken early on in my time here about whether the bigger brands in English football should share a bigger part of the spoils. I still believe that is true. At that time, I also said I thought that not doing that would have some effect on the decline of English football in Europe – that’s coming to pass.
“It’s something to look at and it’s something that is still being debated within English football.”
In 2011, Ayre suggested that top Premier League clubs should consider club-by-club sales of overseas broadcast rights, rather than the traditional collective sales model. He said the league's biggest clubs were responsible for most of the revenue generated in these deals, but their contribution was not reflected in how the revenue was shared among all clubs.
Ayre, who has spent 10 years at Liverpool, is set to leave at the end of February.
[This article was updated at 11:45am on 6 February 2016 to clarify that Ian Ayre in his most recent comments did not refer specifically to abandoning collective Premier League media rights sales.]