Would Declan Rice take less money to be less knackered?
One game was a fling with a sexually adventurous gymnast; the other was eating chips with your gran and spilling vinegar down your shirt. Two very different approaches to kicking a football, born out of different economic and cultural architectures.
When talking about PSG v Bayern Munich compared to Atleti v Arsenal, it’s tempting to say one is much superior entertainment to the other, that eating chips doesn’t compare to licking cream off a willing woman who can bend double. And they’d be absolutely right. Why choose or accept the quotidian when you can have your synapses blown by an insatiable double-jointed woman?’
This isn’t about scores, success, competition or league positions. It’s about entertainment.
Yes, we want variety but not the good then boring, then mostly boring, then poor but dressed up as great, then okay for a half sort of variety. And we don’t wish to be unrealistic, it’s just that there is an obvious difference to football more usually played in the Premier League to anywhere else. Not that this is an absolutist position. There are always examples to be picked to prove or disprove an argument. It’s about generalities.
But this gulf in enjoyment is quite deliberate. You absolutely can have a more enjoyable game, but you can’t have it if things remain the same. Everything that has become normal must change, but the mentality and the structure of the Premier League doesn’t allow it to change. The major concern is the endless pursuit of money. The majority of European clubs make a profit, so are less desperate for cash and aren’t so needy for every bit. It’s less of a disaster for most clubs if they lose.
The Premier League generates more cash than the Bundesliga and Serie A put together and yet only six out of 20 clubs make a pre-tax profit. They receive and generate more money, play more games, do more broadcasts, play more tournaments, make more overseas summer tours to play meaningless games against each other, yet still despite all that, the vast majority operate at a loss and constantly need more money to prop up what is apparently an unsustainable lifestyle, rather than live more modestly. They’re overspending on everything and exploiting their assets at every turn.
No matter how the players protest, the howls of torn hamstrings and ruined bodies are never heard, only the call of avarice, even as the entertainment gets less and less. It’s fine for Mikel Arteta to say the Premier League leaves players tired but he has to make the logical point which is ‘play us less, pay us less’, but that seems too salty a steak for him to swallow.
You can make a competitive argument if you want – though the gap between top and bottom is largely the same in the top five leagues at 61, 60, 60, 58 and the lowest 54 in Ligue Un, ironically enough – that doesn’t excuse the frequently dull periods of play. You can’t justify eating sh*t just because there’s some sugar in it. This weekend did you see the Leverkusen game? It was a pulsating and open 3-1 win over Leipzig that never let up, whereas the Arsenal game, which admittedly I ignored, was described by the Guardian as a ‘pedestrian second half’. That first half will be dressed up as the whole game but you didn’t pay for 45 minutes, you paid for 90.
This all requires bigger squads and bigger squads means more income, which means more games which require bigger squads. That’s the hamster wheel they’re on. So wedded to earning money are most clubs that many will sell all available spaces on all available kits, as long as they can get what is often a soul-destroying sponsor to help pay sky-high wages and endless overpriced acquisitions.
The solution is obviously to play much less football and to have a refocus on the actual sport and not the money. Play fewer games so everyone is less knackered. One look at Declan Rice during a game reveals a man who appears to be sweating half his body weight from his forehead and who looks on the edge of exhaustion. Of course it would mean less money for players’ salaries but I’d wager all of them would play for less money that is still 100 times more than they’d earn doing anything else.
This isn’t to ignore the realities of how PSG and Bayern are financed and the nature of their own leagues. But as I say, this is purely about entertainment.
While the amount of football is significant, there’s other forces at play too. There’s a reason European football is consistently more enjoyable and Premier League games have prolonged phases of some of the most boring play. These are players who often play brilliantly elsewhere but are strangled here in this dysfunctional financial world, Scott McTominay being the obvious example.
Yes, Clarence, there’s enjoyment in great defending but what gets forgotten in much of this debate is that football is supposed, at core, to be fun. Have you forgotten that? Fun. The whole ‘points not performance are what matters’ attitude should not be treated as accepted wisdom. And if you want to hold up Atleti v Arsenal as fun then good luck. That wasn’t enjoyable defending, it was just attritional guts and sweat and often tedious. Is this what Clarence Seedorf wants? I’m sure only masochists would agree.
The debate this has highlighted is – once you’ve allowed for the tiredness element – a difference in attitude to what football is and how it should be played and it is inseparable from the finances that the omniscience of win-at-all-costs, negative, defensive football can reap.
So what if PSG let in four at home – this is only a weakness if you see football in a cold, clinical way. Firstly, they scored five, so suck that up and second, call the defenders rubbish if you want but that’s what we want to see. Attacking brilliance that gets the better of defenders is why we pay the money. And it doesn’t mean the defenders are terrible footballers, just that the attacking is better than their defending. That’s good and only a perversion of perception doesn’t agree.
It’s all got far too serious. Money makes it that way in the Premier League, not exclusively but predominantly. It’s pointless to think every game could be like that PSG match for a whole host of reasons but plenty could be much more entertaining. Players here are capable of much more than they’re allowed to achieve. Managers who are more pragmatic – no matter how many times Martin Keown approvingly says the teeth-grinding cliche “get it over the line – are cowards, too afraid of losing to take any chances, or slaves to a bottom line which is already overdrawn.
No one got into the game in any era to watch grind-core, but it’s become a default and is now passed off as the only way and even admirable. So when we see how it could be, it’s become a real shock, as it was last week. Football has become much less than it could be. In short, the Premier League has been revealed as the sepia world of the chip-eating granny, but that double-jointed gymnast is there if we just stop accepting this version of reality and demand better.
