The Premier League reigns supreme in ‘the age of bullsh*t’

I write a TV column every week because I watch a lot of football from all over Europe, probably a lot more than most, including Serie A and B and Bundesliga 1 and 2 on YouTube, which I heartily recommend if you’ve not embraced it.

Watching so much football has taught me that the entertainment value (I’m not interested in the metaphysical and notional measurement of skill) of the game is largely the same everywhere. For example, I enjoyed the Spurs game but no more than the Raith derby. Sassuolo v Napoli was a bit flat, Juventus v Parma was fun, but any game featuring Everton invariably tests the patience.

In other words, it’s all good, bad and indifferent. The rest is marketing. That’s why I’m cynical about being told how good the Premier League is. It seems an example of how over-praising something actually makes you think it’s worse, as it often manifestly fails to live up to the hype.

You are as likely to see a 35-yard volley in the fourth level as at the top. A 10-man move results in a goal? It can happen anywhere.

But you’ll be told any good game is just because it’s the Premier League as though the quality is innate. They’re very quick to say “typical Premier League” after a good game, never after a boring one.

The Premier League doesn’t have a monopoly on enjoyable football and it surprises me that people think it does. Football is sometimes great, sometimes quite good, sometimes awful, across all leagues and levels. That much is surely obvious to all but casual viewers.

It’s a wonder broadcasters ever got away with their ‘best league in the world’ nonsense given that, even in the early days, Serie A was covered on Channel 4 and much loved, showcasing an exciting football world beyond these shores. I’ve always thought there was more than a whiff of xenophobia and Little Englander about such claims, totally debunked by England’s international performances, which consistently proved these pesky foreign Johnnys could actually play and beat the Premier League’s supposed stars.

But now world football is available to us, why would anybody fall for the hype? Because it is hype, I suppose, and it sucks people in through repetition. This is the age of bullsh*t. You can say anything, as long as you say it with enough confidence, especially if it confirms their often-misguided perceptions, as Brexit and many other issues have proved. And it likely won’t be thoroughly challenged because blarting rubbish is good content and we don’t want to confuse the message with facts or nuance, do we?

This is how the world has turned to sh*t and we have autocratic idiots appealing to people who prefer irrational, ignorant emotions to actual facts. All it takes is to influence enough disengaged, mind-in-neutral people and tell them that being called disengaged, mind-in-neutral is a criticism hurled at them by elites, and you can play the drooling masses like fools.

TNT are running ads for their football coverage under a banner saying ‘It’s Not Normal’, which is bitterly ironic when its coverage absolutely is normal. And Sky’s conflation of volume with quantity is just as misguided. More is not more. In many cases it’s actually less, but try telling that to a company reliant on the notion to rescue falling subscriptions.

I’d like to think most people ignore this sales pitch for the Premier League, I mean they’re obviously going to puff up their own product, but they could do that without this ceaseless claim to a status it doesn’t deserve. It actually has the effect of devaluing it and it insults our intelligence and possibly our viewing habits.

Then again, maybe people don’t watch anything else but the Premier League so default to the drip-fed propaganda; the gross money in transfers and wages probably confirms it IS the elite. When in reality that’s just a sign of its dysfunction, as it gorges on its own flesh and yet complains it doesn’t like the taste.

Get some perspective: Premier League oranges are not the only fruit.

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