The Premier League is like Budweiser: Gassy, hollow and soulless

John Nicholson
Man Utd, Liverpool Arsenal fixtures
The Premier League fixtures for the 2024/25 season have been announced.

It’s at this time of year when we football writers start to make predictions.

I can’t see into the future but I almost always get the Premier League top six correct and usually the bottom six. I don’t get the order correct or anywhere near right but with the exception of Leicester, nothing usually surprises me.

Imagine a situation where this was not the case. Where a club could have a great season and end up doing well, like QPR in 1976, or 10 years later when West Ham finished third, or the following year when Norwich finished fifth.

It sounds fanciful now and that shows how much football has changed. We have been conditioned out of expecting the top six to be any different and spend our time debating who will finish third or fourth out of six teams, or seven if we’re feeling adventurous. The only variable is if some new owners throw a lot of money at it. That’s not a sporting variety, it’s a financial one.

The question we used to ask and got us excited was ‘do you think we’ll have a good season?’ which meant we would spend some time in the top three, or even top the league like Carlisle in 1974 (before relegation) and end up fifth.

Finances dictate that can’t happen now and that means it’s effectively a 14-team league fighting it out not to be relegated. Broadcasters try to tell us this as a good thing and have fooled some who know no different. If you support, say, Crystal Palace, finishing seventh is an unbelievably good season. Not for you the higher echelons. You can’t dream. You have to be exceptionally high on hopeium to do that.

This narrowness only exists at the top of the pyramid. No such elitism exists elsewhere. If your team is in another league, you can absolutely dream of a good season. So it’s ironic we’re sold a league that offers less variety than any other as a primo competition. A classic grift where less is sold as really more.

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Surely the whole point of sport is not to know not merely who’ll win the competition but who will do well and who won’t. And if a top six team flops, 10th or 11th is the worst they can expect, not relegation.

For those six teams, it is as good as being a sealed league, ironically enough. Of course it is, they wouldn’t be worth so much or have so much invested in them otherwise and their fans love it. Despite claiming to be against a sealed league if it’s called something different.

You’ve saved the Premier League, have you? You’ve saved gross financial inequality and lack of variety. This season, there won’t be much that is unexpected, you already know that. There will be something, but it won’t be like Derby County going from ninth to first to seventh, as they did in the early 70s. Those were the glory days of unpredictability.

Maybe you don’t care and only want to see entertaining football, but surely part of the entertainment, especially as a neutral, is unpredictable results. Those happen less and less. Any team can’t beat any team, no matter what is claimed, except in theory. Many just stop watching if City go one up for example. Their brilliance is destructive to general interest. Their own fans say they don’t care but I wonder if being the one with an eye in the blind school feels like success.

Obviously money is behind this ironing out of improbability in the Premier League. It’s testament to their great global marketing that it is so popular and keeps its popularity, despite stalling in the UK, who are increasingly growing tired of Super Sundays being so predictable.

The move away from competition to exhibition continues apace and this season it will be marketed once again as though its unmissable and unpredictable in its excitement, even while some of us realise it’s no such thing and turn to the lower leagues.

It could be one of about 15 teams who win the Championship and be cursed with promotion to the corporate greed-fest and neo-capitalists’ playground as one betting organisation plays against another for the pride of 17th place.

Increasingly, football, once a single entity, is fragmented and so is the fanbase; there are those who see football as a kind of distant thing played out by millionaires, unconnected with our lives, more like a video game, something VAR has done nothing to contradict. In the other corner are those who seek a more fulsome experience from local football played by people like us, unpredictable and remunerated more realistically. Some love both, of course.

Purely from a sporting view, as opposed to the economics which seem to belong to the madhouse, there is nothing right or wrong about either position, but the top flight feels like hollow and soulless branding, the way Budweiser does, disposable and increasingly distant, and I’m not sure that is wanted by anyone who isn’t a director, investor or owner. But unless the economic model changes, nothing else will and I will continue to win top-six bets placed with very, very short odds.

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