Dirk Gently If you really want to know the club who ruined football, it's Spurs, and if you want to know an individual to blame, then it's Irving Scholar.
There used to be Rule 34 in the FA's books - this said that directors of football clubs could not derive their main income from their ownership of a football club and that dividends paid on shares in football clubs could not be more than 5% of their face value. There was also a clause that prevented clubs from being bought, asset stripped and then closed down for profit.
In 1983, Scholar's wanted Spurs to become the first club to float on the stock market, and they asked the FA if Spurs would be free to form a holding company to get round this rule about dividends and directors' salaries. The FA, for no reason that anyone has ever explained, simply said "yes" - and the rest is history.
Where football is today can be simply traced back to that single failure to make a decision by the FA in 1983.
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Although, think of all that lost revenue from European games because of Heysel.