The EPL - Football's Indifferent Masters

Well Sport is slowing stirring, opening one eye, peeping out from under the continental quilt of Covid-19 and looking for ways to find some sort of rebirth. 

Sports bodies could do worse than ask Matt Hancock to come up with an arbitrary target – 100,000 sporting fixtures by May 15^th, say – and then it will definitely happen. Okay so half the footy matches were played on FIFA, the British Grand Prix was nothing more than Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel sharing a socially distanced Scalextrix and the County Cricket Championship just carried in as normal cos no one bothers to watch that any road, but hey 100,000 is 100,000*.

But the football authorities are looking at ways to get things moving again. Behind closed doors seems to be the most likely first option. Of course Arsenal fans will notice very little difference in terms of atmosphere, save that they won’t have to endure Piers Morgan braying his criticisms of Meszut Ozil from out of the posh seats. 

The rest of us will watch from our sofas (or behind them if you support the Boro) and wondering when if ever, you’re going to get back to that glorious match-day routine:

The pint in the pub, the whiff of onions and salmonella from the hot-dog stands, the moral crisis as an adjacent fan offers up another racial slur as banter, the slow unravelling truth that the dreadful performance of a fortnight ago is not looking quite so bad in the light of this week’s effort; and finally the post-match pint-packed moan, the slammed front door, the catflap swinging cos your moggy knows better than to hang around, and the all-too-understanding wife looking up from her Netflix nonsense with a face that says ‘I am sorry for your loss.’

Some fans might enjoy it. West Ham fans will feel closer to the action if it’s on the telly than they do at the London Stadium. Man United fans will enjoy the Scousers’ inability to fully enjoy the moment of their Premier League resurrection (but not as much as the wholesale abandonment of the season altogether).

As for the players themselves, well there’s talk of cooping them up together for six weeks of quarantine, before the season kicks back off again. It sounds hellish. It’s bad enough being incarcerated with your own family. In our house, home schooling has become home shouting followed by home sulking followed by the type of atmosphere that you could microwave potatoes in. But being cooped up with your workmates? Is there a space in the country big enough to house the collective egos of Paul Pogba and… well, anyone. And where will Man United house all Pogba's hairdressers?

I suppose all the players will need testing too although when it comes to Jordan Pickford why bother? He hasn’t caught anything all season. Gordon Taylor, Middle Earth’s only successful export, was on the radio saying all the players will be ready by mid-June, which is easy for him to say when he’s not going to be man-marking Jack ‘Reckless’ Grealish in the near future.

Taylor also suggested games might not be the full 90 minutes – well surely they can make that retrospective? Liverpool would be 20 points down if they took the scores from 80 minutes across the season. In fact Man Utd would be a few titles down if they took it further back. The Vulcan-like mind-melding of Sir Alex and the match officials in order to extend a game to indefinite lengths would be of no use in this new 40 minute a half world. Fergie Time be gone!

(I can't help thinking that there was a time at Buckingham Place when the two words Fergie Time must have sent an icy shiver down the collective spine of the Royal Household. Mind you, if you can still tolerate her ex-husband, then maybe not,)

Any road it's at times like these, some dimwits ask if 'football really matters'. Surely just knocking the season on the head and starting again like they’ve done in France makes sense. Well PSG get the trophy before the season starts, so that’s hardly relevant.

And there are livelihoods involved here. It’s obscene for the richest clubs to even consider not keeping as many workers on the payroll as they possibly can – so obscene you might call it Bransonian. The poorer clubs… well there’s a case for arguing that a small town club does more to bind a community together than any other single entity. There’s a case for arguing that without them clubs, all British football becomes is Have-Way-Too-Much FC vs Have-Way-Too-Much FC second XI. Then again, this is precisely what the Premier League was designed to do. Slice off the money-making top tier and let it serve itself first and the national game as a whole a very distant second.

Indeed, you might want to draw a parallel across the country generally. If you create an elite (based almost exclusively on wealth) and your main focus is to maintain that elite even if it means broadening the gap between the rich and the just-getting-by (remember how Theresa was going to help us there? In fact, remember Theresa at all?) then at a certain crisis point, only those members of the elite will be able to withstand a catastrophe. Now, if that elite was in any way interested in sustaining the wider community above and beyond its own narrow interests it might consider using its accumulated funds to support, maintain and benefit those weaker than themselves, until the catastrophe passes on and we can all rebuild again.

But then again, notions of ‘the greater good’ carry little weight in the murky upper echelons of business and/or government, where private firms are helping themselves to NHS contracts, even as the government stallholders clap the endangered souls brave enough to keep going in to work to clear up the debris of their indifference.

But I digress. It’s only footy innit? Just a game. An indulgence, a little luxury on the side. Well no. It’s a living. It’s a passion. It matters. Enormously. It’s more, to me at least, than just another commercial sector that lives and dies by market forces. It’s time for the Premier League to represent more than itself. Lecture over.