Most readers of this newsletter will not be aware that I used to be a massive NFL fan. I grew up in Pittsburgh, where it’s kind of an obligation to be a passionate Steelers fan. It’s been about a decade since I last followed the NFL; most years I don’t even bother watching the Super Bowl. What happened?
I never fell out with my hometown team as such, but with the sport itself. I’d like to tell you I was particularly bothered by the prevalence of CTE in American football, or the rash of domestic violence among NFL personnel, or that I was put off by the gaudy and costly military flyovers, or the suppression of Colin Kaepernick’s nonviolent political speech. But the truth is that I started falling out with the NFL over something far more trivial than any of these. At some point it occurred to me that the NFL simply couldn’t figure out what a catch is. Or even what a throw is. The experience of watching the game became more tedious than it was worth to me when technical rules and ad breaks took center stage, and the growing industry of explaining what the hell is going on started to outpace gameplay itself.
profspur analysis is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Subscribe
I’ve been thinking about all of this recently, because in many ways I think the Premier League is in a comparable situation today. In the age of VAR, I don’t have a whole lot of confidence in the league’s understanding of what a handball is or what obstruction is on a corner kick. The experience of watching the league is, at least for me, slightly tainted by this.
But the thing is, I never played American football, a relatively provincial game on the world’s stage. I never had a passion for the game. It was only ever a part of my life in my capacity as a fan, particularly earlier in my life when so many of my family and friend connections came down to NFL football. The NFL was always something I could walk away from if it weren’t doing it for me. I can’t say the same for football, or for Tottenham. These are immovable parts of my life.
Still, as VAR disputes rage on, as the Premier League increasingly brands itself as a destination for fast-paced, highly physical play, and as we watch an historical cheating scandal unfold at Manchester City, I find myself pondering: Does the Premier League suck?
It’s bigger than Manchester City.
The scale at which Manchester City have operated outside of league regulations is staggering, and I expect that particular club will get something approaching what they deserve for their malfeasance. That said, a part of me can’t let go of the damage City have done to the Premier League itself, the league’s legitimacy. Given the duration of the investigative process—and the accumulation of some 40 days of witness testimony, tens of thousands of incriminating documents out of millions reviewed—it’s hard to imagine the league hasn’t been on top of this for a long time but couldn’t figure out how to mitigate it sooner, even if the investigation wasn’t complete.
I suspect, in other words, the duration of this process is in part to do with the reluctance of the league to let go of the lucrative show we were all getting out of Pep’s City, like Abramovich’s Chelsea. It’s arguable that one of the league’s twisted points of pride to this day—that it’s the destination for the world’s most expensive footballers, the best league in the world at the top of every player’s checklist—is a direct function of clubs such as Chelsea and Manchester City coloring outside the lines to bring in expensive superstars.
The league can punish Manchester City, but who will punish the league for going along with this charade for the better part of a decade?
And even if we say, for the sake of argument, that the Premier League is nothing but an unwitting dupe in City’s diabolical plan, a wholly innocent actor, the empirical fact is that this scandal has tarnished the league’s credibility. Many clubs, many fans have been wronged in complex ways, from clubs that have a case to make that they lost title challenges or cup finals to cheaters, to clubs who might have lost out on Champions League revenue, or were relegated off the back of a demonstrably uneven playing field. Right now, in this moment, the Premier League sucks because investigation into City has proven the competition to be a sham, and the solution to that problem is not obvious, simple, or forthcoming, nor is it exclusive to punishing Manchester City.
And it’s bigger than the boardroom.
The fraud committed by the likes of Chelsea and City is bad enough, but if Premier League fans are being honest with ourselves, much of what’s happening on the pitch also sucks. I’ve already mentioned and written about the deleterious effects of VAR, but I think the league’s gamble on heightened physicality—a point of pride—is actually a net negative.
A lot of fans would say the heightened physicality that characterizes a Premier League match—’letting them play’; grappling on set pieces; bear hugs in the box; a ‘proper ta’le’; ‘he’s got to be stronger there’—is what makes the league more competitive than others. They’re not entirely wrong to think so. If on one end of the spectrum you have a club like City, who’ve been cheating for 9 years to buy a handful of players every transfer window that would set club transfer fee records at almost every other club in the league, and on the other you have a club like Leeds bobbing up and down between Prem and Championship, or Luton Town or Coventry just trying to hold it together with a squad worth £30 million, one way to make things competitive is to allow for aggressive anti-football.
The question is whether that degree of competitiveness is worth the cost of physicality. Another question, by the by, is whether a permissive stance toward physicality is the best way to get parity on the pitch (as opposed to developing league-wide salary cap like the NFL, for example). A third question is whether it’s ethical, from a player welfare standpoint, to promote conditions that lead to grappling and high-speed collision and all-out physical intensity. Again, the NFL remains tainted by complicity in life-destroying and life-ending injury to its athletes; a comparison with what Big Tobacco in the 20th century knew but wouldn’t act upon wouldn’t be out of order. It’s probably not so bad in the Premier League, given the nature of the sport, but the current trajectory doesn’t bode well.
Are skill players voting with their feet?
A curious paradox of the Premier League being the world’s richest and most attractive league for players and managers is that even as Premier League clubs’ net transfer spending, at about €1.5 billion, is about 3.5 times the next league’s (Serie A’s net transfer is about €420 million), the world’s best skill players are either heading in the opposite direction or never moving to the Premier League in the first place.
Particularly as players age (De Bruyne, Kane, Son, Salah, Rodri, Modric) they get the hell out of Dodge. The likes of Vinicius Jr., Mbappé, Julián Alvarez, Olisé, Kane, Kvaratskhelia, Yamal, Dembélé, Bellingham, and Alexander-Arnold play elsewhere. Messi never even bothered. The best midfielders in the world—Vitinha, Neves, Pedri, Valverde, Ruiz—play elsewhere. The Premier League boasts, of course, the likes of Haaland—a player who seems custom-built for physical intensity—Rice, and Bruno Fernandes. But this level of player is rarer than you’d think for a league that nets €1.5 billion in footballing talent in a year.
When we look more closely at the Premier League’s premier technical players, we find a mix of long injury sheets and careful minute-management. The most electrifying skill player in the league right now—City’s Rayan Cherki—is averaging 58 minutes per game this season. Last season he played 1786 minutes in 33 matches, an average of 54 minutes per match.
Cherki so far this season (FotMob)
At Spurs, we lament James Maddison’s ‘fragility,’ but from where I’m sitting it looks mostly like the officiating in the Premier League allows players like Maddison to be hacked down every week. Xavi Simons only played 28 matches last season and was fouled 44 times, which was more times than Sandro Tonali, James Garner, and Morgan Gibbs-White, all of whom played 35 or more games.
Elsewhere, much ado is made over Saka’s ‘overuse,’ but again what I see in Saka is a deceptive player who, like Maddison, Xavi, Grealish, Doku, and Cherki, is neutralized by targeted fouling. Saka was fouled 54 times in 31 games last season. This season he’s already been fouled 15 times in 5 games, 2nd most in the league.
If you’re a player at the level of Harry Kane, Kevin De Bruyne, or Mo Salah, and you’ve had more than a few brushes with injury because you’re good enough on the ball and deceptive enough to keep it and draw fouls, it makes sense to ply your wares in other leagues where cynical physicality is less tolerated, skill players are better protected, and tactical norms are less built around achieving parity through physical advantage and exploitation. The unfriendliness of the league for skill players is becoming a real problem for the league, I think. Michael Olisé was good at Palace, but every time I see one of his meandering drives and finishes for Bayern, I think he’d be hacked down in a heartbeat if he tried that in today’s Premier League, and most of the time it would go unpunished. We might never have known that Olisé is a genius had he stayed in the Prem, just as I think the football world is still learning the depth of Kane’s abilities now that he spends less than 60% of games backing into a center back in an aerial contest while someone slides through his ankles.
Here I acknowledge that this is partly a matter of taste. Football is a dynamic sport that requires a broad range of abilities. It’s possible to play up any one of them—technical skill on the ball, physical prowess in grappling and positioning, pace and endurance, spatial awareness and acumen—at the expense of any other. There’s no correct way to play football, in that sense. However, for my taste at least, I think the Premier League has started to lean too heavily on physicality as its brand, which goes hand in hand with tactical metas forming around physical matchplay. I was always attracted to the game for its elegance more than anything else. And in that department, at least, the Premier League kind of sucks right now.
profspur analysis is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Subscribe