This more competitive season with some unusual teams occupying the top seven is to be welcomed and the absolute dissolution of Manchester United and Spurs is delightful.
For the Premier League though, it’s very much a double-edged sword. They’re caught in a cleft stick. Teams without large global fanbases mean less money for less desirable advertising placements, lower total income and the worry that all those lovely wealthy despots will lose interest. They prefer the domination of the oligarchs and intolerant fascistic oppressors to anything else.
The economics suggest that it won’t be long before money reasserts its dominance. That means the richest succeed and this brief interregnum will be a distant memory. For this season to be a change from the status quo, for even the medium term, the likes of Bournemouth and Forest have to maintain this level of success for several seasons to more permanently transform their finances to compete with the behemoths.
I really hope they can. We badly need to see a future that doesn’t include an inevitable City steamroller to the top, with Liverpool in their wake and the nearly man’s trophyless touchline hysterics at the Emirates. It’s tedious for the neutral. Even those who are too young to remember it being different have now seen what it’s like. Much better when the team you think will win then doesn’t win, isn’t it? Wouldn’t it be great if it was always like this? This year Forest and Bournemouth, next year Palace and Brentford. Yes please.
While there will be blips, blips are not the same as variety being established as innate. Indeed, it’s not set up to be that way, not what the Premier League or UEFA want in order to maximise income. This presents them with a problem. The last thing they want is for us, the financial units on football’s spreadsheet, to see a more attractive way that means them coining less cash.
You’d think a proper, competitive, unpredictable league would be good for business, but I can tell you now that anything we write about a brilliant Bournemouth performance will get a fraction of the traffic talking about another Manchester United humiliation or another Arsenal capitulation. They don’t want it. It’s all about the money, from top to bottom and side to side. If you ever wonder why almost anything happens in top-flight football, ‘it’s the money’ is almost always the answer.
Ideally the Premier League and UEFA want the most followed, richest clubs to dominate but for their audience – which, let’s not forget, contains more neutrals for most matches – to be fed a sop to unpredictability with an outsider club making the top six, so it looks like change enough to mask the stasis.
Financially, these people hate football’s ornery nature but love the riches it provides. They crave a sealed league of big clubs and predictable large income. Sport? No thanks, too unpredictable. How can you invest in that?
Unpredictability does not satisfy their greed gland. But now, it’s not just old fellas like me who are nostalgic for the 70s when twice as many different clubs made the top six than in the last 10 years, youngsters have seen the brilliance of well-run, well-managed teams doing well, thanks to some wealthy clubs not being either. How will they feel when the old hegemony of wealth reasserts itself?
The Premier League, so long reliant on brainwash advertising and slow-motion packages with screaming commentators to fill the excitement hole, might find that people finally realise the emperor has no clothes and is exorbitantly charging you to see his bloated, over-indulged body.
