Arsenal, Liverpool and Man Utd have locked uncompetitive Premier League in ‘hateful marriage’

‘Anyone can beat anyone else in the Premier League’ is fine marketing spiel but also provable nonsense when five teams have no wins from six games.

The pattern is clear. Ten teams, from 11th downwards, have played 50 games and won only six. Yet the Premier League’s self-interested promo merchants would have you believe, and I quote: ‘In this league – the best in the world – anyone can beat anyone else.’

You’ve all heard this said many times, right? The original PFM and footballing bin man, Tim Sherwood was saying it again on Soccer Saturday from behind eyes that seemed surprised by his own consciousness.

The facts suggest otherwise. Even if you take it to include Newcastle in 7th, those teams all the way down to 20th have won just 13 of 70 games. The top six have won 21 out of the last 30 and lost just two.

It shows the power of optimism that this hasn’t seen crowds shrink. If you’re in the bottom half of the league, you’ve only a tightrope walker’s chance of winning your game against a top six team. Any team indeed can beat any other team – as long as one of them isn’t in the top six.

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I think, though it’s a truth never said, we widely consider the likes of the easily confused, vacantly staring, hit-by-a-bus Sherwood, are self-evidently wrong and the league is already unofficially divided into two. A team like Crystal Palace, for example, doesn’t aim to finish in the top six; that’s just unrealistic and an irrelevant consideration. If this default apartheid is breached and some team in 17th beats someone in second, it is widely seen as an earth-shattering event, an almost unnatural thing.

Clearly the teams at the top winning more games than those at the bottom is a given, but it is approaching an unsustainable level for anything that wants to call itself a competitive league on a micro and macro level; things are a little more one-sided every year. Just when you think a team like Wolves can even draw with Liverpool, they concede. It’s probably not an orthodoxy based in form but in finances. And that’s before superior squad strength kicks in, later in the year.

Even Fulham, the interloper in sixth, won’t stay there, though the hope they might is sustenance for neutrals. But sooner or later they will surely be replaced by the Spurs or Manchester United financial behemoths. If Fulham managed to maintain their form, it would be treated as a near-miracle. That tells you everything.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. It hardens every year. Time to end the pretence: 14 teams are fodder for six – that’s not an opinion, it’s just counting. Surely a restructured league without those six would benefit everyone. The 14 should vote for it. It would be to their advantage. They won’t because they fear loss of revenue when not playing a top six side, forever enslaved to paying players ever more. They already can’t enjoy league success or anything near, but it doesn’t seem to matter to them any more. Not being mediocre is the limit of their ambitions in this setup.

Time for something new. It’s not fully competitive, like the rest of football and what’s more the league has encouraged this, in the process killing the goose who lays the golden eggs, you’d think.

But that’s not the plan it seems. The plan is to replace competitive football with what is effectively exhibition football and to turn top six competitive football into a premium product worth paying more to see. It seems to be working. Only the ongoing ineptitude of coaching and playing at Old Trafford stops it going quite to plan, proving at least football retains a modicum of innate chaos. Perhaps the destruction of the ludicrous transfer market which the Premier League dominates, via the ongoing Lassana Diarra case, will change financial demands, but I doubt it. Too many have got too much at stake. It’s their business, not ours.

The game’s limitless lust for more money is as naked as a razor and has already extended the amount of games played in the Champions League, and other competitions and in the process has meant more meaningless games between big teams, seemingly unaware of the fact that scarcity of such ties is what makes them special, not increased frequency.

The largest percentage of football’s money, one way or another, is derived from Manchester United and Liverpool, and a bit of Arsenal, as I’m sure you’ve worked out reading our website. In terms of numbers, very few want to see or read about, say, Southampton. Sorry, But that’s what we’ve voted for, even though we didn’t realise. So cutting them adrift absolutely would affect their finances. They have to change their model and get over it if the sport matters more to them than money. Which it doesn’t.

The wealth of the 20 is reliant on two or three. Until it changes we are stuck in this doom loop of non-competitive football and lots of predictable results in the Premier League, separated like a leper, from the rest of football. A kind of unspoken agreement to stay together for the money, like some hateful marriage. And the pretence goes on at delusional levels, fooling less and less. And Sherwood continues to look like he’s just arrived on earth and hasn’t quite worked out that soiling yourself is not the same as eating.

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