The sportswriter Simon Barnes tells a story of being at the 2002 World Cup and talking about his delight at seeing so many upsets – Senegal beating France, the USA beating Portugal, South Korea beating Italy, etc. His colleague from the Sunday Times, Hugh McIlvanney, was not impressed. “That’s the difference between you and me,” he told Barnes. “You like giant-killers. I like giants.”
You wonder if even McIlvanney’s fascination with giants might have been pushed towards its limits had he lived to see Manchester City win an unprecedented fourth Premier League title in a row last May. Football has arguably never seen a giant on the scale of Pep Guardiola’s team. They are “easily the best club of all time,” according to Ian Graham, and, as the former director of research at Liverpool FC, he should know.
But while this may be the time of giants, or at least the time of one supergiant, it somehow doesn’t feel like a golden age. Part of the problem is the sheer sameness. Stand in the shadow of the same giant for years and you might find yourself pining for the giant-killers you had previously scorned.
In City’s particular case, a bigger part of the problem is the charges. Natural giants are one thing, but what if the giant has artificially puffed himself up by cheating?
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The Premier League season that kicks off on Friday night at Old Trafford feels like a footballing sideshow to the main event, which is a courtroom drama that nobody outside the direct participants actually gets to watch.
A Premier League investigation into the alleged financial breaches at City will culminate in September when an independent commission begins hearing the case. The final verdict, pending appeals, is expected before the season’s end.
Whatever the outcome, the aftermath will be ugly. If City were to be found guilty, the punishment could be relegation or even a Rangers-style demotion to the base of the football pyramid. Abu Dhabi’s sporting colossus felled with the stroke of a commissioner’s pen: this would be a sports scandal with geopolitical reverberations. Imagine being the British government official who had to field that call from the Gulf.
It’s not just the image of Abu Dhabi at stake. City have won the title in eight of the last 13 seasons. A guilty verdict would asteriskise an entire era of English football. If City were to be found guilty yet received a comparatively light punishment – even the kind of points penalty which could render meaningless this season’s title race – there will be outrage and possibly legal action from rival clubs.
An unfortunate element of this from City’s point of view is that more people in football think tribally than logically and many have already judged them guilty before hearing their defence. To these people, City will always be 115 FC. Even if they beat the charges and clear their name, the conclusion many will reach is not that City have proved their innocence, but that the Premier League’s supposed rules-based order is a sham.
And all this just relates to the case at Centre Court. Other clubs facing charges include Chelsea, whose case involves alleged illegal payments during the years when Roman Abramovich was owner, so that’s another super-successful Premier League era potentially asteriskised. Newly promoted Leicester’s chances of staying up are threatened by charges of breaking the profit and sustainability rules (PSR), implying the possibility of a points deduction. Everton are on trial for PSR breaches, as is tradition.
The Premier League sells itself as the greatest sporting show on earth but the key players are increasingly lawyers and accountants. How long can they keep this up?
The contrast with the feelings provoked by the recent Olympics is unflattering for the league. True, much of the charm of the Olympics is that it flashes past once every four years and then it is gone, leaving behind a golden glow of happy memories. It is best enjoyed at the surface level, without delving too deeply into which athletes are working with which coaches, etc – the more you learn, the harder it becomes to enjoy.
But the Olympics at least feels like it is still mainly about the athletes and the incredible things they do, rather than the owners, the lawyers, the referees and the other once-extraneous things that have come to dominate the Premier League conversation.
One way to remind people that the Premier League is still fundamentally a sporting rather than economic concern would be for a team other than Manchester City to win the league for the first time in five years (ideally not by default thanks to a points deduction).
City remain favourites, largely thanks to the endless resourcefulness of Guardiola (maybe the biggest tribute to him is that since the departure of Jurgen Klopp, every potential rival is now coached by a Pep disciple or imitator). Yet even for him, five titles in a row with the same team is surely asking a lot. City have sold Julian Alvarez, who contributed 28 goals and assists in 37 matches’ worth of playing time last season, and this week lost the impressive young forward Oscar Bobb to injury.
The most convincing challengers are Arsenal, burning with ambition to complete the charge they started two years ago. They have reinforced the defence, the strongest part of the team last season, with Riccardo Calafiori, Italy’s best player at the Euros. Gabriel Martinelli can surely give them much more than the six league goals he managed last season, and Kai Havertz will need to perform from the beginning this time around.
Arsenal at least are a known and reliable quantity. Post-Klopp Liverpool are unknown. Like Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger, Klopp had come to define the club. The task of replacing such a legendary figure has proved beyond managers as capable as David Moyes, Louis van Gaal and Unai Emery. Maybe Arne Slot will have better luck. After Liverpool’s failed efforts to sign Martín Zubimendi and Anthony Gordon, and with speculation building over the contract stand-offs with three pillars of the side in Virgil van Dijk, Mohamed Salah and Trent Alexander-Arnold, he might be due some.
It seems far-fetched to imagine that Manchester United can add 30 points to last season’s total to transform themselves into contenders, though the addition of Matthijs de Ligt and Noussair Mazraoui will surely improve a defence that last season conceded two goals for every one conceded by Arsenal.
By the old-fashioned metric of money spent, Chelsea – with €1.3 billion invested in players since the Todd Boehly-fronted consortium took over – should be major contenders. With 43 first-team players in the current squad Enzo Maresca needs to purge before he can build. But then you factor in a possible points deduction and you realise it hardly matters whether Maresca purges or builds. As the charges and cases pile up, the Premier League clings to the hope that in spite of it all, fans will keep caring, just because they always have.
