Welcome back, Steven Gerrard: forget Europe, avoiding the drop is your priority
When Ray Wilkins left Paris Saint-Germain in 1987, it seemed entirely natural that he should join Rangers. He was, after all, joining two England internationals in Terry Butcher and Chris Woods at Ibrox. A year later they would be joined by another in Gary Stevens. There was the immediate context of the Heysel ban on English clubs competing in Uefa competitions but, still, that is another world.
It seems almost incomprehensible in today’s financial environment that top English talent would flock to play in Scotland. And that perhaps is the most significant aspect of Steven Gerrard’s appointment as manager of Aston Villa – less what it says about him or Rangers, or even Scottish football, than what it says about the Premier League.
Like Brendan Rodgers before him, Gerrard appears to have had little hesitation in accepting an offer, not from a Champions League qualifier but from a Midlands club with aspirations. Realistically, perhaps even after winning a Scottish league title, that is as big an offer as is going to come.
And it is a big offer. Even with the sale of Jack Grealish for £100m in the summer, Villa’s net spend over the past four years is just under £250m. They are part of the Premier League’s growing middle class who may be beginning to reassert themselves. Just two wins separate sixth from 15th and the early signs are that this could be a less stratified league.
Before anybody gets too excited, we probably should remember how the Premier League table looked at this stage last season. After 11 rounds of games, Tottenham, with 24 points, were top on goal difference from Liverpool, with Chelsea and Leicester within a
win and Southampton fifth, four points back. Then came the two Manchester clubs, both of whom had a game in hand. The truncated pre-season, the compressed calendar, the empty stadiums – as Spurs beat Manchester United 6-1 and Aston Villa put seven past Liverpool – there was a thrilling wildness about football. Who knew what was going on?
There was a thought that Pep Guardiola might have reached some sort of limit at City, six points behind the leaders in seventh, having already lost to Leicester and Spurs. But as it turned out, City won the title by 12 points, Manchester United, Liverpool and Chelsea took the Champions League slots and two of the promoted sides went down with a club who had come up the season before. Everything suddenly became extremely normal: funny things can happen at the start of a season and a little over quarter of the fixtures probably isn’t enough to draw any firm conclusions.
Within two weeks, Tottenham had suffered the defeat at Liverpool that was the beginning of the end of José Mourinho’s time in charge, City had embarked on a run of 15 straight league victories and Burnley had secured the 1-0 win at Arsenal that ignited their surge away from the relegation zone.
There has been none of that sense of chaos this season, yet still there feels a change from those three seasons before 2020-21 in which the champions took 98 or more points. There is a clear big three of Chelsea, City and Liverpool, but for all their qualities, none is without flaws. Three clear at the top, Chelsea are on course for 90 points. That is still historically high, the joint-seventh biggest tally for the champions, and four more than City’s total last season, but feels like a return towards normality.
That may be to say no more than Chelsea’s re-emergence as a third major force now they have a manager to match the calibre of their squad necessarily dilutes the domination of the top two – and, of course, it remains possible that one of those big three could suddenly do what City did last season and win a dozen or more games on the spin to surge clear of the pack and towards a total in the mid-to-high 90s.
But there is something more intriguing going on. The sense is that the Premier League has benefited from the financial crisis caused by Covid because of the strength of the TV deal. Although Premier League clubs experienced an average €59m (£50m) shortfall in revenue in 2019-20, that was proportionally less than was suffered in any of the other big five leagues.
There is a tier of players – such as Son Heung-min, Youri Tielemans and Ollie Watkins – who in pre-Covid times might have moved on by now. At the same time those mid-ranking English clubs have been able to pick up talent from abroad relatively cheaply: players such as Boubakary Soumaré, Alex Kral and Leon Bailey. That has strengthened that middle band, with the result that nobody quite has the feel of doom Sheffield United and West Brom did at this stage last season (although Norwich soon may).
Newcastle, without a win or a clean sheet so far, might have seemed on the brink, but the arrival of the Saudis, the appointment of Eddie Howe and the expectation that the bone-saw billions will lead to an influx of players in January means they can expect to improve.
Much the same was said about the impact of the Premier League TV deal after Leicester’s title success in 2016, but the landscape was then changed again by a fresh wave of investment by City, including the arrival of Pep Guardiola, and Liverpool’s acquisitions of Virgil van Dijk and Alisson (funded by the sale of Philippe Coutinho and thus, indirectly, by PSG’s purchase of Neymar). Super-club spending reshaped the landscape quickly then, but Covid has shifted it once more.
That means that the environment Gerrard comes into is extremely tough. Villa are one of probably six to eight clubs beyond the obvious four of Chelsea, Liverpool, City and United with realistic expectations of being regular European qualifiers and occasionally breaking into the Champions League. That means at least three or four of them each season are going to be very disappointed.
Villa may not want to hear it, but lying just two points above the relegation zone, with Burnley starting to get results that match their performances and Newcastle’s lift-off to come, Gerrard’s first priority must be to avoid relegation.
The appointment of Eddie Howe and the bone-saw billions mean Newcastle can expect to improve