In most natural spherical objects, like planets or stars, the centre is typically the heaviest part because the gravitational pull draws denser materials towards the middle, leaving lighter materials on the outer layers. Go with me here, but it is becoming increasingly obvious that the English Premier League, the best division in world football, is afflicted with the same curious sensation.
On the day that Liverpool have surely all but confirmed a record-equalling 20th league title, by easing to a staggeringly comfortable 2-0 victory away at current champions Manchester City, it would be easy to write this off as a comparatively uninteresting season. Equally, it is looking an inevitability that the three promoted sides will be going straight back down to the Championship for the second successive season. The top and the bottom of the league have rarely both been so drama-free simultaneously, but that is partly due to the chaotic clusterf*** that is going on in-between the traditional title and relegation battles.
As it stands, after most sides have played 26 games, only 11 points separate Manchester City in 4th from Crystal Palace down in 13th. Look away Arsenal fans, but that’s the same gap between the Gunners in 2nd and Liverpool at the top. To further illustrate my point, at the same stage last season, the gap between 4th and 13th was a whopping 28 points. I’m using 4th as my marker here as it has traditionally been the last available spot to qualify for the Champions League, but the grouping probably also goes one place higher to include Nottingham Forest in third as well. That’s 11 teams all in one massive congested lump, or 55% of the division. And even more interestingly, this group doesn’t include either Tottenham or Manchester United, who are having statistically catastrophic seasons for sides of their stature and wealth.
The idea of the ‘Big 6’ has been getting less and less relevant for a while now, but this season is surely where the notion has been killed off for good. Also, a quick aside to say that the initial concept for the Super League and it’s closed, NFL-style system has never seemed so ridiculous, at least from an English point of view. It would be easy to say things have never been more competitive but that would actually be a slight simplification. Things have never been closer between the aforementioned 11-13 teams, but that has had the knock-on effect of widening the gap between those established sides and those who come up from the Championship, so you could argue that the evenness across the entire 20-team division has actually decreased.
There are a number of factors that are contributing to this phenomenon, with some simply being a peculiarity that may only apply to this season, and some that are far more deep-rooted. The first thing to mention is the fall of Manchester City. Pep Guardiola has created the most dominant side we’ve ever seen in the Premier League era, amassing record points and winning four titles in a row, whilst establishing a kind of invincible-like dominance that made the idea of even competing with City, let alone taking points off them, unthinkable for practically three-quarters of the league. But as the saying goes, all empires fall, and City have fallen hard this season. Not only has this obviously meant their own league points tally and position have dropped, it’s also had the effect of adding to everyone else’s, as now most teams fancy their changes of getting something out of their fixtures with City.
That may well change next season. For all the wide-ranging theories for City’s demise, they’re going to be a whole lot better simply for having Rodri back, and it wouldn’t overly surprise me if they won the title back at the first attempt next year. However, there is a more general and long-term pattern emerging in the teams below (or now amongst) the traditional title challengers. Put simply, the ‘rest’ are actually pretty bloody close to the ‘best’ these days. Brentford, Brighton, Bournemouth, Fulham and Nottingham Forest are all having fantastic seasons, and have all beaten the big boys at different moments. Aston Villa and Newcastle have both played Champions League football in the last couple of seasons, and are in the mix once again.
And this isn’t an anomaly, this is the result of them hiring some of the world’s best coaches, and investing heavily, and crucially sensibly, in their playing staff. There is plenty of variety and fluctuation in the approaches of the club, ranging from the steady, data-orientated models of Brentford and Brighton, to the chaotic, seemingly scattergun policy of Nottingham Forest, but they’ve all been proven to work over time. Equally, the playing styles are all different from each-other, with each manager having their own principles, and this clash between methods is what makes the league tick, and continues to absorb viewers.
What is arguably the biggest factor of them all though is the quality of players these clubs now possess. And I’m not talking about this in terms of good recruitment, though of course it is due to that as well, but simply that the pool of players that these clubs can now attract has expanded significantly in the last five years. Look at the evidence: Brighton’s front four is better than Chelsea’s (despite our best efforts to copy them in every conceivable way); Brentford have two 15-20 goal-a-season strikers in Wissa and Mbeumo (having only just sold another in Toney); Bournemouth signed Porto’s best striker in Evanilson and an exciting young centre-back from Juventus in Dean Huijsen in the summer; Fulham and Nottingham Forest have done a masterful job of poaching the talent that the ‘Big 6’ could no longer accommodate (Smith-Rowe, Pereira and Wilson at Fulham, Hudson-Odoi and Elanga at Forest); and finally even a team who are 17th and still technically in a relegation battle in Wolves have someone as good as Matheus Cunha upfront.
There is a bigger reason behind this. There was already a financial gap between the Premier League and the rest of Europe, but it has got even bigger after Covid. This has led to a self-contained player-trading network which is completely reliant on the Premier League clubs, and where the wasteful excesses of those at the top of the food chain (Chelsea and Manchester United are most guilty of this, but also Barcelona in La Liga) has led to a trickle-down of top-level talent to those below them. Added to this is that because of PSR, there is no longer the same culture of ‘big-club-bullying’ that there was once was. If a club has a high-value asset (Caicedo and Rice at Brighton and West Ham are good examples of this) they are entitled to sell only at a price of their choice (if they’re even willing to sell at all) and one that should give them ample opportunity to reinvest effectively.
So, where is this leading? And is it actually a good thing? After all, it would be fair to say that no-one is tuning into the best league in the world to see who finishes seventh or eighth. And I do think it may hurt our chances as a nation of dominating European competition (as we did in 2018-19 when we all had four finalists in the Champions and Europa League finals) because our supposedly strongest sides aren’t going to be able to dominate as they once did.
However, I can see a scenario where we get another ‘miracle’ season, (as in Leicester in 2015-16) in the next five to ten years. All it would take is for one of those sides currently locked in the “heavy centre” to manage to keep a ‘golden generation’ together, and for the traditional challengers to all have an off-season at the same time (Liverpool didn’t get the memo this time unfortunately). Villa and Newcastle would probably be the best bets for this, and I suppose the biggest indication of the changing dynamics in England’s elite division is that if they, or someone else, did truly shatter the glass ceiling and win the biggest prize of all, whilst it would still be richly impressive, it wouldn’t actually feel like the ‘miracle’ that it once appeared to be.
George F Brown 