It was strangely appropriate that London was in political chaos over the UK’s impending exit from the European Union when the Premier League clubs gathered unruffled at their meeting and awarded their executive chairman, Richard Scudamore, an eye-popping £5m for choosing to leave his job. There they were, modern representatives of football clubs formed as social enterprises in Victorian England, by churches, schools and enlightened employers, presenting an image of being in a kind of money bubble, voting to give grossly excessive thanks to the man who has enriched them over 19 years.

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Nothing has become Scudamore at the Premier League so much, now, as the leaving of it. Until the £5m was handed out to frame his departure, his long exit had all been going so well. When he announced in June that he had finally had enough, most people greeted the news with traditional politeness, acknowledging his strengths and contribution.

That did not feel like the time to plough back too much over his confrontations, his ruthless turf wars, particularly with successive Football Association chairmen and chief executives, fought when consensus might have been better for the game. His main record recognised then was the ballooning of TV money during his time in charge, but generally this was covered as a kind of grand achievement, rather than as a victory for greed and inequality. Nobody, including those who feared and disliked him, has ever said he was incompetent and his professionalism and thoroughness maintained his long tenure while the FA executive sat in ejector seats at Wembley.

He was regarded by the Football League, where he was previously chief executive, as a man who understood the game, even as he played tough with its 72 clubs, insisting on changes to suit the Premier League in return for crumbs of “solidarity” money. In his resignation remarks he generously thanked the Premier League staff for their professionalism, decency and fun and those who have flourished with him do seem to like and admire him. Scudamore remained a steadfast supporter of the Football Foundation, which distributes money to grassroots facilities and projects, even if he played too clever with politicians over the Premier League’s original pledge in 1999 to contribute 5% of its income.

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That never happened; the figure the Premier League claimed to understand became 5% of its TV deals, then, following an effort by the Labour sports minister Richard Caborn to get more, an argument that any percentage applies only to domestic TV money, not burgeoning international rights. The current £100m to grassroots facilities and projects amounts to 3.6% of the Premier League’s £2.8bn annual TV income and there has been no offer of more since the FA’s proposed sale of Wembley stadium collapsed.

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Now, after many campaigns to persuade the Premier League to put 5% into wretchedly underfunded grassroots facilities, there is a number five applied as the full stop to Scudamore’s tenure.

It seems to clarify Scudamore’s time in charge, this £5m, shoving all those saving graces to the sidelines and putting in the foreground a big lump of money. When news of the bonus broke, Kieran Maguire, a football finance lecturer at the University of Liverpool, did the dark and lonely work of totting up Scudamore’s salary over 19 years; it adds up to £26.3m. It was an era when owners of Premier League clubs, too, have made huge money from the rising value of their shares and when the great old clubs have been bought by a portfolio of financial investors.

Some might observe that Scudamore was lucky, in the right place at the right time, that football’s billions have been made by exploiting British people’s embedded love for their clubs and historic game, the pay-TV rights inflated more recently by BT Sport’s emergence as a genuine corporate rival to Sky. That is true, and Scudamore also relied on advisers and consultants, but he packaged it all up very competently and defended the breakaway Premier League from all the campaigns and many challenges to its privileges.

The clubs stressed that part of the £5m is to keep such a dazzling talent from working for some unspecified rival, while acknowledging that some is pure gratitude, expressed in the language they all understand.