Ideally, in sport, there will always be a strong correlation between the decisions a team or an athlete makes and their levels of success.
If too much luck is involved in any sport then it all starts to feel a bit arbitrary and meaningless. If good or bad judgement isn’t rewarded or punished accordingly, for any reason, then there’s a danger that anyone watching starts asking “what’s the point?” – which is, arguably, when a sport has lost its structural integrity.
And so to the top division in English football. The Premier League, right now, risks and indeed already embodies just such an unhealthy disconnect. Decisions and consequences aren’t matching up. Specifically, the teams taking the risks aren’t being allowed access to the rewards.
Consider the biggest actual transfer story so far in this January transfer window—Wilfried Bony’s proposed £30million switch from Swansea City to Manchester City. A year and a half ago, Swansea signed Bony for £12million from Dutch outfit Vitesse Arnhem. It was a proper risk: big money at a financially small-time club, a high-profile team record signing and a relatively young player who had never before played in the Premier League.
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Swansea took on the burden of finding out whether Wilfred Bony was going to be a good goalscorer in the Premier League. But now that he’s established that he is, having scored more than anyone else in the league in 2014, now what? Well, Manchester City is going to have him instead, despite its pre-existing assortment of top-class strikers. Swansea got about a year’s worth of payoff for its gamble before one of the moneyed few stepped in to stop the fun.
This is hardly an isolated incident. What’s happened at and to Swansea is a pattern which the Premier League replicates continually and increasingly.
Southampton has spent years under successive managers bringing youth team players into its first team. Gareth Bale, Theo Walcott, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, Callum Chambers and Luke Shaw all emerged as a result of this policy of taking less than known quantities and giving them their professional break. And yet none of them have been allowed to do anything more than “emerge” at St Mary’s. They’ve all moved on as soon as they’ve become somewhat proven quantities.
Liverpool took equivalent risks last season, playing extreme, attacking football and proving that it was possible not to bother with defending if you didn’t want to, and if you had Luis Suarez. Its reward was receiving a bid for Suarez that even it—a pretty hefty club in its own right—couldn’t afford to turn down.
The rule is, evidently, that anyone outside of the tiny financial elite group of teams gets very little access to the rewards which their risks create and which they therefore deserve. Almost as soon as these teams have quantified an unknown, someone else more powerful steps in to intercept it. Almost as soon as they’ve speculated, someone else accumulates.
Inevitably, it comes down to money. Football’s financially dominant few – Manchester City, Manchester United, Chelsea, Barcelona, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich and Paris Saint-Germain – are now so dramatically dominant in financial terms that they can essentially afford to out-source risk. Less and less are these teams doing what United under Alex Ferguson did with, say, Nemanja Vidic and Patrice Evra—placing bets on new, young players from other countries. Rather, they wait to see how everyone else has bet and simply take their winnings from them, as City has done with Bony.
If you don’t agree, then ask yourself: how many real risks have any of these elite clubs taken in the last five years? Remind me how Real Madrid came up with signing Bale and James Rodriguez again?
The effect of this no-risk strategy is also inevitable—footballing dominance to match the financial stuff. If you can allow everyone else to take your risks for you, then you ought not to lose very often at all, and you’ll notice that these elite clubs simply don’t. Quietly this season, Manchester City and Real Madrid have both set club records for most consecutive wins, and Bayern Munich has acquired more points in the first half of the Bundesliga campaign than any club ever has before.
By definition, these are sequences of unprecedented dominance and it’s not an accident of timing that they’ve arrived together in the same moment. Even in a Financial Fair Play world, elite clubs are able to spend increasingly more than their notional league rivals and in doing so they reduce the risks that they take every step of the way and reap only the rewards. When they are allowed to pay ever higher premiums on established talents they are simultaneously allowed to fortify their positions at the top better than ever before—by winning and winning and winning—regardless of how many right or wrong decisions the likes of Swansea or Southampton or even Liverpool make. Or, actually, because of them.
Success is not, currently, about making correct decisions. How else could Manchester United be fourth in the Premier League right now? And making correct decisions does not seem to create success.
The question now, then, is can the sport—and particularly the Premier League—sustain itself when so many clubs have their levels of success determined not by the quality of their judgement, but by the size of their bank statements? Does the question “what’s the point?” ever get loud enough that it can’t be ignored?
Ethan Dean-Richards is a London-based writer. Follow him on Twitter