The Premier League Squeeze Is Here 📊

Back in Yorkshire, as it happens: I spent the weekend in Scotland, on the sort of reporting trip that could not have worked out better. I went to two games in 24 hours. The first, at Falkirk, ended with a euphoric last-minute winner, fans spilling out of the stands to celebrate with their team. The second, Hearts’ win against Celtic, stands as the best game I’ve been to this season.

I’ll explain why in more detail below, but it had a little bit of everything: high stakes, high drama, high emotion. For my intensely selfish purposes, too, it had that indefinable quality of being A Story. Scottish football is often treated as an afterthought in Britain, cast into perpetual shadow by the power of the Premier League. It is so overlooked that we don’t even take time to marvel at the glory of Scottish team names: Queen of the South. Airdrieonians. Stenhousemuir. Inverness Caledonian Thistle. 

For once, though, the spotlight shifted north of Hadrian’s Wall. Celtic’s manager, the estimable Brendan Rodgers, resigned on Monday, prompting a quite extraordinary statement from the club’s majority shareholder. To replace him, Celtic returned to Martin O’Neill, a fine manager but one who I think most people assumed had retired. Intrigue, infighting, incendiary comments: this is the good stuff.

Nobody could ever accuse the people who write the Premier League’s scripts of lacking either originality or imagination. Over the course of what we unfortunately have to call its imperial phase, English football has exhibited a knack for creativity, imagination and – sufficiently consistently that it feels deliberate – downright weirdness. 

The list of potential examples here is quite a long one, but we’ll make do with the traditional three. There was the One Where Gary Lineker’s Views on the Middle East Got “Match of the Day” cancelled. There was The One Where The Manager May Have Pooed On The Floor In Revenge. There was The One Where The Defender Kicked A Cat.

It is odd, then, to have followed the opening bars of this campaign with a lingering sense of déjà vu. It is not all familiar, of course. Having three quite good promoted sides is an interesting twist. Going all in on the 1980s revival – first the jerseys, then the set-pieces – is maybe a little derivative of broader culture, but it’s something we haven’t done before. The demise of Ange Postecoglou was a smart subplot.

At its core, though, the structure of this season – or at least the season so far – feels like a re-run of what we were experiencing 12 months ago. 

The champion has, all of a sudden, collapsed. Admittedly, Manchester City hung on for a little longer than Liverpool. It was only at the start of November that Pep Guardiola’s team sputtered to a halt; Liverpool’s slump began in late September. We don’t know, yet, how low Arne Slot’s side will fall, but the echoes are pretty clear. City also lost four in a row (tick). They would go on to win just one game in nine. Liverpool should not give up hope. If they try, Slot’s players can probably do worse than that.

If it was Liverpool who benefited from City’s travails last year, then Arsenal seem to have taken advantage this time. Mikel Arteta’s team have 22 points from nine games – seven wins, one draw, one defeat – and a goal differential of +13. Liverpool’s record last year was almost exactly the same (the goal difference was slightly worse, at +12, and at that stage City was still top, but let’s not let details get in the way of a good argument).

As with Arsenal so far this campaign, it was widely accepted that Liverpool had built that points total without having played especially well. Common consensus had it that Slot’s team were playing within themselves, that it would at some point be necessary to find another gear, that their games were not actually especially entertaining. Those criticisms were different only in specifics. 

But the strongest, clearest echo is what is happening beneath Arsenal. Bournemouth currently sit second, on 18 points. Andoni Iraola’s side has been the great revelation of the campaign. Spurs, who most people agree have been deeply unconvincing, sit third, a point further back. 

Manchester City – roaring back to form – and Manchester United, who were in an existential crisis three weeks ago, are level on 16. Liverpool, the league’s great laughing stock, have 15. Everything is tightly packed all the way down to, what, Brighton in 13th, with 12 points? Leeds in 15th, skirting the relegation zone, with 11? The whole league is crammed and crushed together, sides with wildly varying narratives squashed cheek by jowl.

You’ll have guessed, by this stage, that all of this was precisely the same last year. After nine games in that campaign, there were seven points between Arsenal in third and Manchester United in 14th. The gaps remained fine long into the winter; it was only after the festive period that the concertina effect, most of the league pressed tight, one win enough to catapult a team half a dozen places, started to ease. 

The reason the pattern has repeated, of course, is because the root causes are the same. The Premier League has had various phases in its existence – the Big Four (2001-2010) and the Big Six (2010-2020), for example – and it seems a fairly safe bet to say we have, in the years after the pandemic, entered a new one.

The wealth of the league has translated into a greater reserve of strength than it has previously enjoyed; there are, at a rough estimate, maybe 13 teams who would have reasonable expectations of finishing in the top half. And at least three of them are not currently in the top half.

It is telling that both Slot and Enzo Maresca, the Chelsea coach, have admitted in the last couple of weeks that they have been caught out by their opponents changing their system, rendering all of their preparatory work. It is even more telling that one case involved an embattled Manchester United and the other newly-promoted Sunderland. Dangers lurk everywhere in the division; teams can change style, and personnel, at a whim. The league is so close, the gaps so small, because all of the sides are more evenly matched than has previously been the case.

What is not clear is whether we have caught up to that reality yet. There was, last season, a tendency to decry that iteration of the Premier League as an unusually weak one. There have been whispers of similar complaints as this campaign has started to gather steam. 

The logic of this stance appears to be that the major sides are not dispatching their opponents by four and five, that half of the competition has not been reduced to cannon fodder, that they are not racking up dozens of wins on the spin. This is a sign, by all accounts, that the Premier League’s glory is fading, that despite the colossal sums of money spent in consecutive windows on the best players on the planet, it is but a pale shadow of what it once was. 

The reality, of course, is the opposite. The fact the middle-classes and the makeweights are now able to land a few blows for themselves, that they are capable of standing up to the traditional elite, is a sign not of weakness, but formidable strength.

It takes some getting used to, of course: there is something counterintuitive about the idea that getting 80 points now might be harder than getting 90 a few years ago, but that may well be the case. It might, in many ways, be the best twist of all: the Premier League, more than 30 years into its existence, is finally the competition it always claimed to be. 

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The English can be terribly snobby about Scottish football. It is, they will reliably tell you, horribly predictable, excessively parochial and desperately poor quality. They will say all this with a degree of relish that is not especially becoming, and makes it quite irritating that the first part has been true for vast stretches of time and that the second is a bit of an oversimplification but basically right.

As for the quality: it is absolutely true that the teams of the Scottish top flight cannot attract the sort of talent that fills squads in the Premier League. That hasn’t always been the case – Rangers, as recently as the early 1990s, had a team filled with stars, at least compared to what was then the backwater of England – but it has been true for a generation, maybe more.

I’ve always been a bit baffled by this line of argument, though. Very few of us watch sports with an expert eye; it is not necessarily the technical wizardry on show that draws us in. More often than not, the appeal is emotional: we watch because we want our team to win, or because the stakes are high, and we know that one side is going to be jubilant and the other devastated at the end. That can apply to a game played close to the pitch of perfection, but it is not vital. There have been plenty of compelling games that have been deeply flawed, if you really think about it.

At Tynecastle, in particular, my mind wandered a step further. One of the factors that made the game so absorbing was the fact that it did not feel quite as smooth, quite as polished as a Premier League game. Players made mistakes. The first touch was not always pure. There were poor choices. 

And all of them combined to create, well, action. Spectacle. A sense that anything might happen at any moment. It may be the case, I think, that games need to be imperfect to be entertaining; or, at least, that imperfection adds to the entertainment. 

Rog and Rory break down the biggest games from last weekend’s Premier League slate that saw Arsenal increase the gap on their title rivals thanks to Eberechi Eze's goal against his former team, Manchester United show promising signs of life thanks to Matheus Cunha, and Liverpool continue to slide. Watch on YouTube or listen here.

I’ll be honest here. There are some good games around Europe this weekend. Nothing too spectacular – bear in mind last week had so many that I forgot to mention the clásico – but the top two, Galatasaray and Trabzonspor, meet in Turkey (where there’s also an Istanbul derby, between Fenerbahce and Besiktas) while Leipzig against Stuttgart is second against third in the Bundesliga.

But I hope I’m not being biased when I say that Liverpool against Aston Villa is the most intriguing game in Europe this weekend. We’ll come back to the pros and cons of what a friend of mine has started calling Set Piece Britain, but wherever your loyalties lie, the story around Liverpool is fascinating.

Can Arne Slot work out how to defend long balls? If not, how long and low can the champion’s slide go? How quickly can something built so carefully unravel? And how many teams are prepared to abandon their usual styles, playing against type, in order to exploit Liverpool’s very obvious weakness? The game likely won’t be of the highest quality. Both these teams should be aiming no higher than qualifying for the Champions League. But it’s hard not to want to rubberneck at least a little.

A lovely missive, continuing our sudden Scottish theme, from reader Jeff Faucette, who was in the Best Bit of Britain a couple of weeks ago, where he happened to catch Celtic’s defeat at Dundee. (I’m really sorry, if there are any Celtic fans reading this: I feel like I’m picking on your wonderful, passionate, storied club. Which I kind of am. But you’ve won so much that you should be able to take it.)

“It was only midway through the second half that we heard [the Dundee fans] singing,” Jeff wrote. “I guess like those in Edinburgh, the Dundee fans could not really bring themselves to believe they might actually beat Celtic. I’ve never had a Scottish team, but Dundee seems as good as any. We were also told that, at one point, only four cities in Europe had two teams that have been to the semifinals of a European competition, and Dundee was one of them. How many hold that distinction now?”

That’s a great bit of trivia. Purely off the top of my head: Milan, Madrid and Manchester, for a start. I’d guess that Liverpool, London and Glasgow would round off Britain. But after that, I’d be struggling a little. Lisbon maybe? I have a feeling Athens might have done, but only recently, thanks to Olympiacos in the Conference League joining Panathinaikos in the European Cup. I must be missing a couple, but I’d need to cheat to fill the list in, and I am above that. For now.

And thanks, too, to Jordan Vinikoor, who got in touch to ask if there’s a place where he might be able to find a list of my various recommendations – made in the newsletter and on European Nights – for where to eat in sundry European cities. Good news! There is! It’s in this map, helpfully updated whenever I remember to tell the good people at MiB that there’s somewhere to add. I have a new one this week: Disposition, a coffee shop in Edinburgh, where I had an excellent cinnamon roll and a wonderful coffee on a rainy Sunday morning. That’s no help to Jordan, who’s heading to Italy, but if you’re in Scotland, I’d endorse it.

That’s all for this week – thanks so much for reading, and please do keep your questions and quibbles coming to [email protected]. I love reading your ideas and thoughts, and I’m trying to answer as many as I can.

Have a great weekend!
Rory

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