The New Reality of the Premier League 🎢

This week has made me think a lot about a trend forecaster called Sean Monahan. A couple of years ago, Monahan published a Substack post that, from almost anybody else, might have passed by without notice. There was, he wrote, something coming. Something was changing. He wasn’t quite sure what, but it was. We were – in his words – on the cusp of a “vibe shift.” 

I’m not quite sure what qualification you need to become a trend forecaster, but Monahan is clearly good at it. His prediction was worth taking seriously because he had been right before; he is credited with naming, if not pioneering, what we now know as “normcore.” If he said something was in the water, the type of people concerned with the state of the broader culture tend to check their drinks.

Anyway: this week has, I think, felt very much like a Premier League vibe shift. It is too early to be conclusive, obviously; the problem with statement results has always been that you have to go and play more football games afterwards. But there is a distinct sense that we have passed through some sort of curtain, that this season is now an Arsenal thing, not a Liverpool thing.

Or maybe that is a prime example of this week’s subject: our increasing tendency to try to predict the future.

There was no raised dais, no glitter cannon, no trophy presentation when Kosovo became champions of the world*. There was no bus parade through the streets of Pristina, no presidential reception, no national holiday. It is perfectly possible, in fact, that nobody noticed at all. This will have been because of that asterisk. Kosovo’s honor was, unfortunately, only an unofficial one.

You may well not be aware of the title known as the Unofficial World Championship. In what might as well be classed as its formal form, it is a relatively new phenomenon, invented in 2002 by the RSSSF, one of the early sources of data about football. As a concept, though, it is much older, a post-pub argument held since time immemorial: what if football worked more like boxing, with a world title that was decided not by staging a tournament, but passed on in defeat?

The answer is a world in which, last month, Kosovo became unofficial world champions, thanks to a victory over the previous holders, Sweden, in a World Cup qualifying game. Prior to the Swedes, it had passed through Algeria, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast and Uruguay. Only occasionally does the unofficial world title coincide with the actual one: Uruguay claimed it from Argentina, who had held it ever since beating Croatia in the semifinal of the 2022 World Cup. In hindsight, maybe that is why Lionel Messi was so happy. He knew he had unified the belts.

At Old Trafford a couple of weeks ago, it struck me that pressure can work in much the same way. Watching Enzo Maresca trudge down the touchline after defeat to Manchester United, it felt like perhaps Ruben Amorim had now handed him the mantle of the Premier League’s Manager Under Scrutiny, the latest sacrificial victim being apprised by English football in its insatiable bloodlust.

It did not last, of course. The following week United lost at Brentford. Amorim looked forlorn in the technical area again. A few hours later, Chelsea lost as well, the club’s owners walking grim-faced across the field at full-time, prompting dire warnings about Maresca’s fate. Fortunately for both, Liverpool lost a single game of football, which meant the reigning champion was apparently drifting close to crisis, too.

This is the rhythm of the Premier League now. There was a time, not all that long ago, when English football looked on agog at the unapologetic ruthlessness of Italian soccer with awe and fear and just a little bafflement. Serie A’s giants would lose a handful of games, drop a few points, and immediately start firing managers. We looked at the owners of the clubs, well-dressed men in dark glasses, and saw in their foolhardy impatience an intolerable and counterproductive egotism.

The Premier League, now, may well be worse than Serie A ever was. Perhaps not in terms of the clubs themselves – most of which have internalized the idea that sometimes underlying performance is more important than results – but certainly the media landscape in which they exist. A single defeat, sometimes even a draw, for any of the major teams is now sufficient to prompt days of inquest, demands for change.

On one level, this is probably understandable. The seven or eight, depending on how you count Aston Villa, elite sides of the Premier League are now some of the richest clubs the game has ever seen. They have impossibly deep resources, squads packed with quality, a level of talent that would have been unimaginable even 15 years ago. They all have adjusted their ambitions to match. They are not, really, meant to lose games, even to each other.

On another, though, it feels like an obvious anachronism, a failure to notice – or at least to understand fully – quite the extent to which English football has changed.

There was a time, perhaps around the last few years of the first decade of this century (I will not be using the term the ‘aughts’, just so we’re all clear), when there was a clear gap in the Premier League. The Big Four of Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool were all sides capable of winning the Champions League. 

There were a couple of others – largely Everton, Tottenham and Aston Villa – who at times had valid aspirations of joining them. And then there was everyone else: teams for whom Europe was an occasional treat but more often a distant dream, teams concerned primarily with avoiding relegation, teams to an extent aware they shared the same competition but very different aims. 

In those circumstances, one of the so-called Big Four dropping points to a relative minnow was not necessarily a rarity, but still something of a shock. Those results were noteworthy, genuinely eye-catching. More than a couple in a short space of time was grounds for concern. It suggested legitimate under-performance. The manager could expect, at least, to face questions.

That is not the landscape of the Premier League any more. Igor Thiago, scorer of two of Brentford’s goals against Manchester United, cost $40 million. Brighton defeated Chelsea with Italian, Dutch and Belgian internationals on their bench. The Crystal Palace team that beat Liverpool is not only 18 games unbeaten and the current holder of the FA Cup and Community Shield, but favorite to win the Conference League. Oliver Glasner’s side is one of the best in Europe. 

Losing to these teams, in other words, is not quite the surprise it ought to be. Almost every club in England has a squad packed full of internationals. The lesson of the Premier League over the last couple of seasons, in particular, is that the gap between the sides with ambitions of winning the title and those behind them has been closing rapidly. This is no secret. The Premier League itself makes the point frequently and volubly.

But it doesn’t feel as though that has been factored into the way we assess the performances of the bigger sides whenever they suffer a setback. It is still treated as the unfathomable mystery, the unacceptable disgrace, that it was two decades ago. Dropping any points at all, in any circumstance, is now enough to prompt a wave of both existential angst and outright fury.

We might be well-served to reflect on what we expect – what we can expect – even these extraordinarily wealthy teams to achieve, what standards we are holding them to, and whether perhaps a small recalibration is necessary.

It no longer seems to require near-perfection to win the Premier League title; a single defeat is no longer fatal for any side that harbors that ultimate ambition. They might have stacked rosters with exorbitant salaries and state-of-the-art facilities. But so does everyone else. An occasional defeat should not be a surprise. A bad week should not be enough to see a manager’s future cast into doubt. Soccer is not boxing. Not every loss is a knockout blow.

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Just a little bit surprisingly, it was left to Alan Shearer to act as an unexpected source of empathy. Shearer is, generally, a hard-boiled sort of a character. You can choose your own euphemism. He’s matter-of-fact. He doesn’t tolerate fools. He speaks his mind. As a striker, he was devoid of ornament. That’s pretty much how he approaches life.

But as Liverpool toiled to defeat at Galatasaray on Tuesday, Shearer – on commentary duty for Amazon Prime – steadfastly refused to bite on the idea that a second defeat in four days represented a crisis. It was, he admitted, a “drama,” but he was keen to stress that there are mitigating circumstances. Liverpool’s players are mourning a friend, he said, and it is hard to know how much of an impact that might be having.

Hearing Shearer mention the death of Diogo Jota in that context struck me as surprising. It has become the great unsaid of Liverpool’s uneven start to the season. Partly that’s probably because of a natural reticence to say anything that might be taken as glib, but I think it is also because football – not just fans, but the people actually involved in it – is essentially allergic to anything that might be seen as an excuse.

Liverpool’s players will not, for example, want anyone to suggest that they have played poorly over the last week because of their grief. They will regard it as their job to shoulder that burden. They might even feel patronized by the suggestion. There’s a decent chance that many of them do not regard it as a factor influencing their performances. Maybe, for some or for most, it isn’t, at least not consciously.

But these things are not black and white. That Shearer noted it, even in passing, is an all-too-rare acknowledgment that the players on the field in front of us are human, that they are subject to external pressures, that the outside world can bleed into our great escape. I’ve written before that this season was going to test all of us at some point; it seems that point has arrived.

As a fan, Liverpool’s performances over the last few days have been frustrating. That’s how it feels when your team loses, especially when so many of the problems feel self-inflicted. But I’ve tried to remind myself (with at least a bit of a success) that the greatest challenge facing this team is not how to integrate Florian Wirtz or how to get the best out of Alexander Isak. It is something far more complex. Soccer may not be interested in excuses. But it should be willing to consider explanations.

Rog and Rory take a look back at how it all went so wrong for Erik ten Hag and why his failure at Bayern Leverkusen harms his reputation more than his time at Manchester United. Watch it here.

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This week’s Men In Blazers podcast brought a deeply controversial question from a listener, asking about the morality of switching teams. Hearing Rog’s perspective was, to a European, fascinating.

It is not something we consider over here particularly, but it makes complete sense that the model of sports – where each city has multiple teams and how those teams can, like the Springfield Isotopes, just up and leave at the whim of an owner – changes how you interact with those teams. American hearts may well be larger than European ones. You may have more capacity to love. 

Still, I have to live my truth, and my view on switching teams is pretty hard-line. You can’t just swap. But you can – you maybe even should – try and spread your love a little. It makes perfect sense to hedge your bets, for a start. But it also allows you to engage with the true glory of football, which is how global it is; picking a side in other countries, or even other leagues, enriches the experience of the game.

Which brings us to a great question from Chris Roselle. “I noticed  an Eintracht Frankfurt scarf in your background,” he writes, perceptively. “Do you have other favorite teams/teams you like to follow in the other major European leagues?”

The answer here is a resounding yes, and not just in major leagues. I have teams all over the place. Would you like a list? Here is a list. In Scotland: Hearts. We had friends in Edinburgh when I was growing up; Hamish was about my age, and he was a Hearts fan, so I adopted them. I don’t support Hearts in an active sense; I’m not disappointed when they lose. I am happy, though, when they win.

Elsewhere, we have Bari in Italy (I fell in love with a player called Igor Protti in the mid-1990s) and Kaiserslautern in Germany (same, but for Ciriaco Sforza). Metz has always been my French team (a lot of these sides play in maroon, which may be a theme). I would say I now have a genuine fondness for Bodø/Glimt of Norway, but that is much more recent.

And then, elsewhere, I maybe have tastes, rather than outright affiliations. I think it’s hard not to become invested in most of the game’s major rivalries, to find that you find yourself drawn to one side rather than the other. I skew more Barcelona than Real Madrid, Red Star rather than Partizan Belgrade, Sporting ahead of Benfica (and Porto) and Panathinaikos more than Olympiacos. Argentina is a weakness: I’d say Boca Juniors more than River Plate, but then the real star of my background, Chris, is a súperclasico half-and-half scarf. I’m guessing not many people in Buenos Aires would approve.

And then we have the knottiest one: other teams in England. I have found myself more and more emotionally connected to Leeds in recent years, as I’ve tapped an unknown well of civic pride. The same goes for Harrogate Town and, to an extent, Bradford City, my other local sides. Again, it would be too much to say I am upset when they lose, but I am pleased to see all of them doing (relatively) well. And that is, I think, a good thing: football’s great appeal is its depth and its breadth. Sampling as much of that as possible should be encouraged.

I don’t know how heretical that view is, so if you have a slightly more polygamous approach to support, let me know, preferably with explanations of how you came to place your widespread affections. The email address is, as ever, [email protected]

Have a great weekend,
Rory