The Premier League has had somewhat of a bad week.
The main symptom of this was a string of disappointing performances and/or results across the two European cups. Sub-symptoms included a loss of “credibility,” widespread self-righteous mockery and op-ed columns like this one conducting by-the-book soul-searching on the league’s behalf.
As for the cause, it had something to do with an error in perspective. Particularly Manchester City and Arsenal, but to a certain extent Tottenham and Liverpool too, who went out and attacked their more-than-useful European opponents with not enough regard for their exact place in the current footballing hierarchy. At this moment, none of these teams has the high-end firepower up front required to be as aggressive as they were in their respective ties—only Bayern Munich, Real Madrid and Barcelona really do—and yet they went for it anyway, and subsequently got pulled apart.
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They thought they were better than they were, basically, and they paid for it. In doing so, they provided a lot of people with an opportunity to delight in the Premier League’s collective downfall—which would be understandable, because this is a league that has rarely sold itself short from the moment it came up with its own hubristic name.
They also provided another lot of people, possibly including Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore, with an opportunity for quiet reflection and even mourning. The emperor’s new clothes that we collectively buy-into every weekend were exposed, laying bare a league in its mid-twenties, having a minor crisis of confidence for the first time since its teens.
But there was another opportunity in there too. That is: another way of looking at this sorry mess is to say that it is no sorry mess at all. The Premier League may have a small quality deficit at this moment in time, but guess what? That doesn’t necessitate a reduced spectacle. In fact, the league’s top-end might even be better to watch right now because of its shared mediocrity.
Think about it. Currently, Arsenal, City, Manchester United, Liverpool and Tottenham are all either out of Europe or travelling in exactly that direction and yet what they, along with Southampton, are producing in the league right now is one of the closest battles for second, third and fourth place in its last decade. After years of “The Big Four” feeling locked in (a few minor, spaced-out shuffles aside), suddenly a genuine competition has emerged from the embers of mutual incompetence. If Tottenham wins its game in hand, between City in second and Southampton in seventh there will be just nine points.
An authentic struggle like this one, I would argue, is better entertainment than the occasional, predictable rearrangement of Chelsea, City, United, Arsenal and Liverpool. Any team that wins out this season will have a much clearer context for what its victory means, because it’ll know precisely who it beat and how hard it was to beat them, while we, the fans, will be able to remember a contest that didn’t seem decided before it started out. And it’s no mere coincidence that these benefits have turned up now, when the best teams are so weak.
My opinion is that we can only really get to this competitive sweet spot within a climate where Arsenal can lose to Monaco, City can lose to Middlesbrough and United can’t figure out what Louis Van Gaal means by “philosophy.” Only these kind of teams, with these kinds of recurrent flaws to hold them back, are ever likely to stay close enough for an entire season to keep us guessing as to who wins right until the end.
Of course, theoretically, there is the possibility that a lot of teams could be very good at the same time, but that’s altogether more unlikely, given the financial structures in place in football. There are always far fewer teams that are capable of being really good than teams that can be sometimes good but with major caveats and regular defeats. The disappointing reality is, if a United or a City is performing anywhere near the level that their money might allow for they will tend to win comfortably, pulling away on their own early on, however impressive a season someone like Southampton or even Tottenham might have.
So, if you like a deep competition, more teams being bad tend to be kind of good. And this rule applies on a micro-level too. Gary Neville pointed out in Sunday’s game between City and Liverpool that what made it an exciting 90 minutes of football was the same reason that both of these teams was already out of Europe: they’re reckless; they throw men forward and don’t always send them back again.
Neville was identifying a trend. The best games to watch are regularly full of mistakes (think also: Liverpool 3, Tottenham 2, or Tottenham 5, Chelsea 3) that these teams at their best would be either too competent or too cautious to make, depending on how you look at it. So, again, being bad ends up being good.
What do you think?
Now, I’m not saying that the Premier League should start advertising itself on these terms, or that United or City should deliberately sabotage their inevitable rebuilding processes just to keep things as fresh as they are now. But certainly I’m saying it’s okay to make room in the post-mortem of this bad week for some acceptance: Chelsea aside, the best teams in the Premier League right now aren’t that good, but that itself is not that bad.
Ethan Dean-Richards is a London-based writer. Follow him on Twitter