LockerRoom: The curious thing about professional sport is the inability of those who run it to retain any thought for longer than 10 minutes.

For instance, Larry MacPhail is mostly forgotten about. In the strangely joyless world of the Premiership he's never been heard of. Yet Larry MacPhail could teach us all a thing or two.

In 1938, Larry MacPhail became executive vice-president of the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team. The Dodgers of the '30s were but a pale and limp forerunner of the storied franchise they would become. MacPhail had breathed life into the Cleveland Reds and came to New York to resuscitate the Dodgers.

MacPhail knew something about publicity and about audiences and about the connection between the two. His first act in Brooklyn was to install floodlights. He knew that evening games would draw a larger radio audience and a larger radio audience meant good things for any sports organisation. He left nothing to chance either. When the Dodgers played their first evening game MacPhail staged an evening of festivities around the event including Jesse Owens sprinting around the bases against the clock.

MacPhail was a mercurial, quirky character. Having built the Brooklyn Dodgers franchise towards success and profitability, in 1942 he just sold his stock and joined the Army.

He returned to baseball in 1946, heading up the New York Yankees. The following year the Yankees won the world series and on the night of their success MacPhail got into a row with the owners and packed in baseball for good.

His smart, enterprising spirit was soon forgotten about. MacPhail was acutely aware of the value of media. In May 1853, the New York Sunday Mercury made passing mention of an exhibition baseball game and baseball came to immediately recognise that making an ally of the media would work to its advantage. Sport always forgets though.

On the days of games MacPhail begged local radio stations for 15-minute preview slots which would promote the imminent fixture. Baseball in Brooklyn grew and grew until the Dodgers acquired the status of myth.

That golden age of baseball would eventually wane and give way to the miserable present era of wandering franchises and greedy owners and striking players. If you ran the Premiership you'd be interested. Well, you should be but running the Premiership means you have the long-term memory of a sparrow.

This morning we could be entering into a new era of media relations with the Premiership, depending, that is, on how negotiations finished last night.

Three years ago, in an attempt to take the golden goose and run it through a mangle just to make sure there were no more eggs in it, English football established a body called FootballDataCo with the intention of shaking down the media.

The first strike from DataCo was to implement a 60 per cent hike in the licence fee it charged newspapers for publishing football fixtures. You would think, being an ordinary person going about one's business in the outside world, that the publication of football fixtures was a service provided by the media to help football's customers be better customers. Wrong.

When newspapers demurred in the matter of the new £2,500 fee it was pointed out that for online services the new fee was £7,000 rising to £12,500 if you wanted to include Scottish fixtures. Hence, so few soccer websites actually carry match fixtures.

It didn't end there of course. Proof that the barbarians had taken over came with DataCo's attempt to licence individual reporters for accreditation to matches. This licencing agreement would prohibit writings or broadcasts which "damage the integrity or reputation of the football league, the clubs, players or officials".

In other words, football, never less than openly contemptuous of the media on which it depends (and vice versa, the relationship is symbiotic), was attempting to abolish objective criticism and co-opt newspapers and TV companies and broadcasters as PR flunkies.

The media resisted that one, pointing out they would be happy to bypass the press box and place reporters in paid for seats in the ground to do their job properly. DataCo let it lie. This summer, though, they came back with their latest wheeze. DataCo wanted seven per cent of the revenues from Fantasy Football Games run in the media. And they wanted a two-hour embargo on the digital reproduction of photographs from games.

That DataCo would push this far was hardly surprising. They had succeeded in limiting access to and use of teamsheets. (Remember how line-ups used to appear on Page 321 of Ceefax on Saturday afternoons? Ah well!) They had squeezed money from newspapers for basic information like fixtures and they had come close to limiting the right to objective reporting. Why not stitch the media up further by putting the arm on for a cut of the Fantasy Football business and screw the media for a couple of hours while clubs sent out photos on their ludicrously expensive mobile phone services.

The newspapers said, finally, that enough was enough and in recent weeks many British dailies and Sunday papers have been carrying reports and league tables without mention of sponsors' names. Most are considering declining to publish photos with sponsors' logos on them. DataCo have responded by threatening to ban reporters from football grounds as and from tonight! Happy days.

For the media, perhaps the oddest thing is to be in the position of being right and to be dealing with people who couldn't run a peanut store. The Observer is running a fascinating series at present on the state of the Premiership. High ticket prices. Lower attendances. Declining TV audience (Sky's average audience share is down to 11 per cent from 19 per cent last season). Poor standards of competitiveness. Economic imbalances. Players with the moral standards of those who lived it up during the last days of the Roman Empire.

The Premiership is overhyped. It is non-competitive and fundamentally unfair in the way it runs its business, screwing the lower orders while the rich get richer. Nobody in charge seems to understand that football sells an intangible, football sells entertainment.

Football needs a limit on squad sizes and a US-style restriction on wage budgets. It needs a fairer, more socialist income distribution model. It needs some bloody romance and an injection of fun. Instead, it wants to strangle that which it depends on, the media.

Vodafone are into Manchester United for £30 million over the next four years. Last week the Times reported that press pictures showing the logos and names of shirt sponsors over a four-week period had given football's sponsors £4.6 million in free advertising. That's before all the mentions of Coca Cola and Barclays.

Football will eat itself. The media will move on, providing more space for sports which exist back in the real world. It might be no harm. It would definitely be more fun.

Larry MacPhail's spiritual contemporary and eventual successor in baseball was the great Bill Veeck, whose motto was "It's got to be fun". Veeck would walk through the stands at games introducing himself to fans getting a feel for what they wanted.

He was a rogue and a genius. Every deal he made was for "$500 down and the rest when you catch me". He courted the media and in turn the media brought him fans and money. He invented a thousand new ways to get sponsorship. He once gave away live guinea pigs to fans at a game. He got home runs sponsored so that a home run became A Wheaties Wallop.

Famously, at the end of one season he found his offices filled with boxes of Wheaties and at a loss for something to do with them brought 60 cases home to feed to his pigs. He came out the next morning to discover the hogs had eaten the boxes and the wrapping but hadn't touched The Wheaties.

He happily told the story to everyone. It had to be fun.