The Premier League are braced for their hunt to find a new chief executive to take until the end of the year after being rebuffed by a second candidate to fill the vacancy left by Richard Scudamore.

Tim Davie, the chief executive of BBC Studios, turned down the Premier League’s advances on Wednesday, forcing the governing body to turn once again to their shortlist of candidates. Their first choice, Susanna Dinnage, pulled out of replacing Scudamore at the end of last year just weeks before she was meant to start the job.

The five-person recruitment panel chaired by the Chelsea chairman, Bruce Buck, which is working with the executive search firm Spencer Stuart, has now widened the search and has accepted it could take many months for them to have a new chief executive in place.

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With the broadening of the search it is not clear whether Tom Betts, ITV’s director of strategy who was on the original shortlist, is still in the Premier League’s sights or even still interested in the job following the recruitment debacle.

The hunt has become embarrassing for the Premier League, albeit not its fault. Dinnage was praised by Buck as the outstanding choice when her appointment was announced in November but she pulled out at the end of December.

In broadening the search, industry sources point to potential candidates including Dawn Airey, one of the UK’s most experienced media executives who recently returned to the UK after running Getty Images in New York for three years.

Airey built her career on a string of high-profile TV roles – including two stints at Channel 5 where she was famously quoted as saying its strategy was based on the three Fs, “films, football and fucking” – and top roles at ITV and Sky. The 58-year old also spent two years at Yahoo as its top European executive. It is not known if Airey has been approached about the role.

Some major Premier League clubs had urged Gavin Patterson, the chief executive of BT who steps down at the end of the month, to step forward but he did not apply for the role. Having not been involved in the process to date the 51-year old is not tainted by the politics of not being the first-choice candidate – offering an elegant solution for the Premier League – if he were persuaded to change his mind about the position.

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However, candidates will be aware that following in the footsteps of Scudamore, who ran the Premier League for 20 years, will be a difficult task as the economics of football change in the digital age. The Scudamore era was marked by massive increases in the value of Premier League rights in the UK, and more latterly around the world. When he took over, in 1999, the division earned £25m a year, it now stands at about £1.1bn annually.

However, a new chief executive cannot rely on such revenue growth as the value of the multibillion UK rights appears to have peaked, although selling Premier League rights overseas continues to grow by double digit percentages each three-year auction cycle. Last year, Sky paid £3.57bn to retain the lion’s share of the rights for Premier League matches from 2019-2022, a 14% discount per game on its current deal. The deal marked the end of hyperinflation in the UK market with the rivalry between Sky and BT pushing the Premier League’s take up 70% at each of the previous two auctions. The total cost of the rights has rocketed from £1.78bn for 2010-13 to £5.13bn for 2018-19.

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The Premier League’s attempts to draw deep-pocketed Silicon Valley giants into bidding, to continue to drive rights inflation in the face of a dearth of new competition from traditional TV broadcasters, has not been considered overly successful.

The restructuring of the auction to include two live streaming packages, a first for the Premier League, failed to achieve the price it was seeking. In the end Amazon did pick up a package, as part of its wider experiment with exclusive live sport streaming in the UK, with BT eventually adding the other outstanding package to its portfolio.

Another factor for candidates to consider is the complex politics of factions within the 20-club Premier League with the big six – Manchester City, Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea and Tottenham – pushing for a bigger share of the rights revenues in recognition of their pulling power.

Richard Masters, the league’s managing director, is acting as the interim chief executive. Scudamore stepped down in June, although he retains an advisory role, with a widely criticised £5m golden leaving present over three years signed off by the clubs “in recognition of the outstanding work he has carried out”. Scudamore is estimated to have been paid more than £26m since taking over the role in 1999.