Chief Sports Writer Martin Swain meets Vic Wakeling – who is finally calling it a day after 20 years as Sky TV’s most influential executive.

Only the bank of 10 TV screens, each showing different channels from this age of digital multi-choice, hints at the business of the 64-year-old grandfather-of-six behind the desk opposite.

But that figure, Vic Wakeling, is the unseen and largely unknown puppet-master who has pulled the strings of British sport in this bold new age of unimagined spectacle.

He hates the label but he knows people call him the most powerful man in his field. It will not be for much longer, though.

After two decades as Sky TV’s most influential executive, Wakeling is retiring next month.

When he closes the biggest and best contacts book in the history of British sports journalism, it will be difficult to over-estimate the impact this one-time hack of our patch has made on all our lives.

For a start there is a generation of sub-25-year-olds who know no other sports world than that beamed to them – in multi-channel, high-definition diversity – by Sky.

Constant, instant, up close and personal.

There are a generation of sports stars, led of course by the footballers, who are driving around dripping in a wealth their forebears could not possibly imagine.

Let’s be frank and dreadfully ‘un-PC’ and admit there are countless women who would not have known or cared less about Rooney or Ronaldo, but are now deeply worried about whether Freddie will be fit for the Ashes.

There are millions more who remember a more innocent age, when footballers ran pubs or opened sports shops on retirement and there was no elite core of clubs – the ‘Sky Four’ as United, Liverpool, Chelsea and Arsenal have come to be known – crushing the unpredictability of our national game.

But don’t try and tell Wakeling, a quietly-spoken Geordie who remembers fondly covering Wolverhampton Civic Hall boxing nights but is now about to step down as MD of Sky Sports and News, that he has created a monster which has devoured a much-missed age.

He said: “There will always be a market for live sport. Always. Because it is true theatre. You go to watch a play or a film and you can generally work it out or you already know the plot.

“But with this, you never know how it’s going to work out. And as people have more time available to themselves, there will be more demand for live sport on TV.

“Football had to change. It needed more investment. After all the problems of the 1980s, it needed new investment. We came along and we provided it.

“That co-incided with a a new breed of chief executive. Younger, more forward thinking. Chairmen, too.

“It helped accelerate the rate of change and put English football ahead of the European market for the first time.

“Our league moved ahead of all the other big leagues in Europe and better players started to arrive in our game. And our clubs invested in their grounds.

“People see the Premier League as a bit of a closed shop. But 42 different clubs have played in the Premier League since it began in 1992.

“If Burnley win the play-off final, it will be 43. There are only seven ever-presents. The strength of the game ripples down as well.

“OK, some are feeling the pinch a little bit at the moment but you see these lower division finals at Wembley attracting fantastic gates.

“We have invested in the game across all the divisions – you would never have seen Walsall, Rochdale or Stockport live on TV before us. You do now.”

Wakeling has been the central and constant figure at the heart of everything we now take for granted in the drip-feed which informs our daily lives, from player cams to Jeff Stelling.

He fell into the TV industry by accident, after editing sports desks in Derby, Birmingham and London, joining Sky at the turn of the nineties – when its football package consisted of a shared programme of live games with the BBC and the Zenith Data Systems Cup.

Well, baby look at you now. Those who laughed at Rupert Murdoch’s brainchild, believing it would never work, acknowledge one of the major cultural forces of the age and the Wakeling-led technical innovations and quality of coverage have re-invented TV sport.

Wakeling recalls: “We looked at football from around the world and I was particularly impressed with the coverage in Germany. I realised the reason why it was the best, because a lot of their pitches were surrounded by athletics tracks.

“That gave their broadcasters the chance to get those low camera angles. We had to go to the Premier League and negotiate to get the same low level, pitch-side angles, to get pits dug where necessary. But we got it done.

“We introduced a two-hour build-up to our first football matches. We had fireworks, pop acts, cheerleaders, even sumo wrestlers – after Season One we had created a stir.

“I remember being at The Dell watching the fireworks going off and a fire officer came up to me and asked me if I realised there was a petrol station on the other side of one particular stand!”

For such a powerful figure, Wakeling is known and respected for concealing his iron fist inside a velvet glove, for using a gentle touch as well as a sure one.

But born in the Newcastle-Sunderland split town of Consett – he is a nervous Magpie this weekend but glad his crew have got a ‘Survival Sunday’ to sell us – he can also be a tough cookie when he needs to be.

He said: “I’ve had Don King grab me by the throat and call me ‘white mother******’ and you know you are looking into the eyes of someone who has killed two men.

“But you realise it’s just an act, designed to put you on the back foot. He wasn’t getting his own way and he was trying to get his point across.

“But I had dealt with boxing promoters all my career, right back to Alex Griffiths down at Wolverhampton Civic Hall. I knew what he was up to.”

There will be no book, mind, partly because Wakeling respects confidences and partly because he never had time to keep notes.

But there will be a trove of treasured memories. The favourite?

He recalls: “May 1993 – Manchester United won their first title for 26 years and we were there for their game on the Monday night. They had already won it because Villa had lost to Oldham on the Saturday before.

“Matt Busby was still alive and in the crowd and we got this great shot of him with tears in his eyes – what a moment that was.

“The following year, too. When we had Blackburn and United going head-to- head. United were at West Ham, Blackburn were at Liverpool.

“I think they lost but United couldn’t get the goals they needed at Upton Park and we’ve done this split screen for the first time, showing the games as they finished.

“Now that was great TV.”