The Premier League's twisting, turning long road to ruin

It is, in many ways, testament to the good health of the nation that we haven’t all started breaking out in cold sweats, suffering heart palpitations and convulsing on the floor, such is the excitement caused by the Premier League season, 2009/10. It is a miracle that any of us can sleep, or work, or eat, or breathe, such is the nervous tension, the anxiety of impatience brought about by waiting to see which incredible twist, which remarkable turn comes next in this rollercoaster of a season.

Consider the complex web of plots that we have to consider. There’s the title race, first and foremost, spearheaded by two of the greatest men ever to walk the Earth, Didier Drogba and Wayne Rooney. So impressive have been the latter’s recent performances that the ordinarily sober Colin Murray described him yesterday as a “player in as good a run of form as anyone in the world.” The former RI:SE presenter, one of the most respected voices in sport, should be commended for watching all of the players in the world, of course, but admonished for ignoring the fact that Rooney has always scored goals in bursts. He’s a little like a medieval field, Rooney. A fallow spell is always around the corner.

Then there’s the battle for fourth, or possibly third, depending on Arsenal’s last result, between CRISIS CLUB Liverpool, the world’s biggest spenders Manchester City, plucky, cash-strapped underdogs Tottenham Hotspur and the flowing, attacking force that is Aston Villa. And that is before we mention the form of Birmingham City, the romance of Burnley, the Owen Coyle saga, the relegation battle, the house of cards built on Fratton Park, John Terry’s love life and countless, endless controversies involving referees, ball boys, linesmen, feuding managers, failing managers and all the rest. It’s enough to make you short of breath just thinking about it. Football. Isn’t it?

And yet it is almost anathema to look at all of this excitement, this barrage of hysteria, and wonder whether any of it, when all is said and done, the dust has settled and the cliches trotted out, is actually warranted.

There is a pertinent sketch in (I think) the second series of That Mitchell and Webb Look, which features David Mitchell wandering around a football stadium shouting about the “giants of Charlton meeting the titans of Ipswich, making them both seem normal-sized.” The scene ends with Mitchell bellowing, in a mock advert for a theoretical sports channel: “Thousands and thousands of hours of football, each more climactic than the last. Constant, dizzying, 24 hour, year-long, endless football, every kick of it mattering to someone, presumably”. Such is the experience of the football fan in the era of saturated, all-day media, when even the most spit-and-sawdust encounter can be jazzed up into an apocalyptic battle for the very future of the planet.

Such an approach leaves little room for objective analysis. When everything is about the next headline, the next yellow ticker, when concern is paramount for viewing and reading figures, calm rationale is not likely to be seen as a strong point. It has become dogma that the Premier League is the best, most exciting league in the world, and the unpredictability it has discovered this season has only served to reinforce that image. Anyone can beat anyone! You can’t tell what’s going to happen! Roll up, roll up, for the greatest show on Earth.

It would be taking devil’s advocacy to extreme lengths to suggest the Premier League does not continue to be exciting. It may even be the most exciting league in the world, though I’m fairly sure to most people the most exciting league is the one their team is in. It is probably the most watchable, thanks to the spectacular, full stadia, the lush, almost invariably perfect surfaces, the blood-and-thunder approach. But the unpredictability which now underpins the league, which has become another selling point, suggests the days of its pre-eminence, its popularity, may be numbered.

Manchester United are not a patch on what they were last season, and, while Chelsea have improved, they are hardly the all-conquering force of 2005 and 2006 (where the term “all-conquering” excludes European competition). The travails of Liverpool and Arsenal are well-documented. Even with two of the traditional Big Four struggling – and with the other two a shadow of what they once were – Manchester City have failed to take advantage, Spurs have dropped a succession of comparatively easy points, while Aston Villa are effective, at times, but rarely attractive. At the bottom, everyone bar the top seven, Birmingham, Fulham and Everton would not find the Championship a cake-walk. Excellence has been sacrificed for unpredictability.

Reading this morning about the perfection of Drogba and Rooney, about the titanic tussle their respective teams are about to embark on, it seems churlish to suggest the Premier League’s era of dominance is over. Such an age may have been a myth, anyway – the idea that English clubs trample the rest of Europe underfoot is exposed as fallacy by just two Premier League teams winning the Champions League this decade – but there does not seem to be reason to suggest the story is about to end, true or not.

And yet, with each twist, each turn, it looks as though the Panglossian insistence that all is well, endowing the most banal mundanity with an ill-deserved significance, is just hype, mescaline for the soul. It is constant, and it is dizzying, and that is why it is difficult to think straight, impossible to notice that, in a world strangled by debt and choking on its own greed, suddenly the giants seem normal-sized.