The vast riches and endless controversies of the English Premier league have become deeply boring, argues CommonSpace columnist Ian Dunn
I’LL admit I was seduced. Like many Scots I looked south and saw glamour, excitement, thrills.
I compared that to what I had at home and found it dowdy, almost embarrassing. I let myself get swept away in the tattooed arms of ‘best league in the world’ and for a while I even liked it.
But when everything was stripped away, when we got down to what really matters, I found the English premier leage was sadly lacking where it counts: the heart.
I let myself get swept away in the tattooed arms of ‘best league in the world’ and for a while I even liked it.
The return of the English Premier League last weekend will have excited many, but failed to arouse the faintest ripple of interest in me. The relentless stream of self congratulatory adverts only confirmed my long held suspicions, this is no longer sport as we know it.
In America they call it sports entertainment, an all singing, all dancing spectacle which presents an ostensibly competitive event for the sole purpose of entertaining an audience.
It’s usually used to describe the Hulk Hogans and Ultimate Warriors of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), but it’s an increasingly apt description of the top level of English football.
Since the birth of the Premier League in 1992 English football has been drowned in an ever-growing sea of television money.
The last time the TV rights were up for sale Sky and BT snapped them up for more than PS5bn.
Now call me old fashioned but if someone gives you PS5bn they get a hell of a lot of say over your product. So it’s hardly surprising that the premier league has morphed into an entertainment subdivision of massive media corporations.
Beyond the pitch, the huge media industry that has grown up around the premier league tends to focus less on actual football and more on fostering, maintaining and inflaming controversy.
Television companies want drama and excitement, which means goals and controversy. So it’s no coincidence the goals per game ratio is on the up, and premier league veterans are talking about ‘the death of defending’.
This is not a conscious decision but instead the unending pressure of PS5bn, that eases slightly when teams deliver a seven-goal thriller. Slowly the nature of the game is changing to deliver a more desirable product.
Beyond the pitch, the huge media industry that has grown up around the premier league tends to focus less on actual football and more on fostering, maintaining and inflaming controversy.
Handshakes, physios and Jose Mourinho not saying anything all generate acres upon acres of coverage. Even the fans are increasingly fake. Within the grounds, the inflated ticket prices make attending matches the preserve of the middle classes and middle aged who can generally be counted on to barely make more than a peep at events on the field.
Yet on the internet, English football ‘fans’ furiously pump rage out of their keyboards at any perceived slight to their team, with anything short of gushing adoration for their chosen side denounced as sickening bias.
This Saturday I’ll be at a Scottish league two game watching the team my dad supports, as his dad did before him.
The joke, of course, is that the bias is not towards any one team, but rather towards perpetuating an endless cycle of controversy that makes more people watch, which means more money paid for the TV rights, which means there must be more controversy to make more people watch.
The actual matter of two teams competing at the world’s favourite sport seems to hardly matter at all.
This Saturday I’ll be at a Scottish league two game watching the team my dad supports, as his dad did before him. The skill level will be low, the financial stakes even lower, but it will matter.
When we score, if we score, in my heart it will matter.
Picture courtesy of Jon Candy