How many clubs in a league can enjoy the level of success that automatically stifles criticism of prosaic methods? The answer, whether or not there’s an Abramovich Chelsea around, is always an extremely low number. For followers of the others, the natural and deserved consolation is entertainment, that and the right to dream.
Neither inducement, it seems, has been sufficiently available in the Premiership so far this season to prevent devotees from deserting the stadiums in their tens of thousands. And graphs reaching back a couple of years suggest the defection is more of a trend than a mere stutter in popularity. That the decline in appeal has many related causes is self-evident. The extortionate cost of admission that has become endemic in English football, where seat prices dwarf those in other European countries, is an intolerable scandal. A surfeit of televised matches and the impact of programming requirements on kick-off times, which are scattered across the days of the week and about the clock face to suit armchair audiences, combine to blunt the nation’s traditional enthusiasm for going through the turnstiles.
Yet the Premiership might have ridden even these huge problems with much less noticeable inconvenience for at least a little longer if what the marketing gurus like to call the product had impressed the public more. Of course, according to certain pundits, some of the games recently condemned as so soporific they should have been watched from a chaise longue were actually brimming with a sophistication that ought to have excited knowledgeable spectators. Here’s Glenn Hoddle on the subject: “If you are a Dutch or Italian coach and you come up with something different to stop teams playing against you, you are hailed as some kind of tactical genius. Whereas our coaches do it and they are immediately accused of being boring . . . Our coaches do not get the credit sometimes.”
Well, boring is boring in any language, which was very much my reaction to attempts to eulogise the 2003 Champions League final between Milan and Juventus at Old Trafford as a connoisseur’s delight. When 120 minutes yielded only two memorable attempts on goal before a penalty shoot-out of operatic ineptitude gave Milan the trophy, the tributes exemplified the emperor’s-new-clothes nonsense experts sometimes invite us to embrace. In Italy, La Repubblica’s highly respected Vittorio Zucconi called the final “a horror”. The match, whatever the claims made for it as a masterclass in organised, grown-up defending, was defined by a shameful absence of committed attacking that was directly due to a morbid fear of losing. We cannot be surprised that the same dread inflicts a disfiguring negativity on so much of the current action in the Premiership, since all but a few clubs live with the reality that they can aspire to nothing more elevated than scrabbling desperately to hang on to the status of bribed extras in a grotesquely overblown TV production.
The additional worry, however, is that a severely inhibiting caution appears to be spreading far beyond the ranks of those for whom relegation is a doom-laden possibility. It is now the predominant ethos of the League. Even at Anfield a week ago, in a fixture renowned for being unremittingly intense, Liverpool and Manchester United were like two fighters so concerned with avoiding getting hurt that they couldn’t summon the nerve or initiative to throw a telling punch. The most decisive effect of the Merseyside meeting was a foot fracture for Roy Keane. Sir Alex Ferguson had learned 48 hours earlier that he would have to do without Gabriel Heinze for the rest of the season, so United’s accumulation of injuries was increasing doubts about their capacity to pursue Chelsea aggressively. Those doubts became mountainous after yesterday's defeat by Blackburn. With Arsenal already beaten twice and held to a draw by West Ham yesterday, any chance that questioning of the overall attractiveness of the Premiership will be countered by the development of a close struggle at the top of the table looks pathetically slight.
It is still argued that the translation of Chelsea’s financial invincibility into player power on the field is a healthy phenomenon, simply the application of orthodox capitalist principles to a sport that long ago became big business, the evolutionary extension of the advantages exploited in the past by the clubs with the largest bank balances. But only the blinkered can refuse to recognise that Roman Abramovich’s billions have fundamentally altered the landscape of the national game. For many years life in its upper echelons has been ruled by money, the need for it and the greed for it, but the Russian’s arrival has massively compounded anxieties about where it is heading.
Efforts to rationalise its finances are blatantly overdue and the proposal from Dave Whelan, the chairman of Wigan, that Premiership clubs should be made to impose a uniform limit on gross expenditure on wages clearly deserves consideration. Obviously a salary cap would be difficult to implement and, if instituted, it couldn't possibly guarantee a swift evening up of competitive potential. But nobody is indulging in such utopian thoughts. All that is being asked for is an attempt to deal with the runaway juggernaut of inequality. The alternative is to wait for market forces to solve the problem. Anybody who believes that’s the answer should seek treatment for realism deficiency.