The first weekend of the season is always fun, because you get to pretend that the small amount of things that have happened are of grave long-term importance and significance when a lot of them will turn out to have been entirely tish or predominantly fipsy.
The opening weekend league table, for instance, is always an absolute joy. Whether it’s Crystal Palace managing to find themselves 12th even at this absurdly early stage, or much-improved Manchester United being 15th, or something really incongruous like, say, Spurs appearing to be in a title race with far more plausible contenders like Man City or Arsenal or Liverpool or Sunderland.
The quirks of the opening-day fixture list can make even teams like Burnley, Brentford, West Ham or Wolves look like relegation contenders, and that’s just plain nutty. But like we said: fun.
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But there’s also the chance for non-fun. For a fixture that just lands perfectly to encapsulate an entire summer’s worth of teeth-grinding frustration-based narrative in an opening-day microcosm.
And this season, that was clearly to be found in the goalless draw between Aston Villa and Newcastle, two teams infinitely better placed than they were a few short years ago but neither of whom is quite where they hoped or wanted to be now. And they are getting pretty frustrated about it.
Throw that background into a match where neither squad is in a state of absolute readiness and a 0-0 draw that highlights the potential and vulnerability of both to an almost sarcastic degree, and you have something approaching a powder-keg.
The frustrations are understandable. Both clubs feel like PSR rules are a drawbridge being pulled up by the very clubs who’ve been allowed to do what they wanted to do.
Newcastle in particular are being gnawed away by the fact that they sold their very soul to become Chelsea or Man City and have instead ended up becoming, at best, Tottenham. A big club, sure, but not a particularly big draw and operating under the constant expectation that your best players will want to leave and that you should let them.
Villa are slightly different, but the complaints amount to the same. It’s a closed shop. The cartel have climbed the rope and then doused it in petrol and it’s Just. Not. Fair.
There is validity to this position. But only to an extent. The frustration is understandable, inevitable even. PSR is an imperfect tool even if you truly believe the intentions were noble to begin with. It’s a blunt instrument, still all too easily circumnavigated by the mischievous and disingenuous (and worth noting here that neither Newcastle nor Villa can claim to be on the side of the angels here).
It absolutely does feel like a cosy group of clubs trying to stop anyone else doing what they did.
But both clubs require far more introspection than is currently being deployed. The timing of Aston Villa’s punishment last week for something so wonderfully silly as breaching multiball laws was delicious.
We’re not saying the Premier League deliberately timed it to wind already febrile Villa fans up even further. We’re not saying that at all. We’re just saying that how they’ve done it is exactly how one would do it, if one were so inclined.
Every post or story about Villa’s six-figure fine for an offence that is wonderfully petty, small and above all twatty, is full of the same gripe: “Man City anyone?” or “And yet 115 charges…” and “Yet the big clubs can do as they please” and so on and so forth.
We’re not sitting here saying Aston Villa fans are unique or even particular standouts in their enjoyment of comparing unrelated things, but it’s a fine example of football’s fondness for whataboutery.
Think about it for a second, and you realise this is limitless in its possibility. Maybe one day there will be an outcome to the 115 charges (it’s also not even 115 charges, it’s 130, but the branding is just too strong now to be burdened by facts or details) but it’s obviously been an absolute nightmare for the Premier League to unpick.
We still think there are only two outcomes. A punishment that is almost entirely if not actually entirely financial-based that satisfies absolutely nobody or, our favourite, the Premier League banking on being able to just wait it out until the seas boil and claim us all, with Villa, Arsenal and Liverpool fans, their eyeballs melting from their skulls in an irradiated wasteland, uniting in their poignant final words: “115 charges anyone?”
Waiting until it all blows over or the world ends is an absolutely first-rate way to deal with something impossibly difficult and we respect it.
Where were we? Oh yeah. The possibilities. If fining Villa for multiball shenanigans before sorting out the tagnut-encrusted web that is City’s multitude of charges is unacceptable, where does it end? Can any punishment for anything less serious than the City allegations be meted out in the meantime?
We’d bloody love the answer to be no. An absolute free-for-all for clubs to do anything at all that is less bad than what City have been accused of, because the league can’t possibly investigate that first. Because fairness.
There, then, is your solution. Almost elegant in its simplicity, despite the ridiculously convoluted 1000-word end-of-the-world way we got here.
While it may seem ridiculous for a man as apparently sane and reasonable as Unai Emery to say Villa are a well-managed club being denied the chance to dream by unfair and inconsistently applied rules when a few short weeks ago they were still employing Philippe Coutinho, you have to say that having a wage-to-turnover ratio of almost 100 per cent is less bad than some of the alleged City stuff.
So Villa should absolutely be allowed to crack on and spend what they like on who they like where they like. Never mind awkward questions about how even under PSR Villa have been allowed to rise from the Championship doldrums to the Champions League knockout stages on the back of owner investment exceeded only by that at Manchester City over the same timeframe: it’s only fair, isn’t it?