Shame that Wayne was not the blue messiah
— Brighton and newcastle — only adds to the tension.
As every league, in every sport, eyes foreign markets, there is talk of changing formats. The Premier League started it by entertaining a 39th game, but La Liga are hastening in that direction too. Media marketing companies are interested in taking Spanish games to China but there is a problem.
Barcelona and Real Madrid are considered a more saleable commodity than La Liga in Asia, in a way Manchester United and Liverpool, for instance, are not.
‘English football is more competitive and there are different clubs for Chinese fans,’ said Yuan Bi of Titan Sports in Beijing, ‘but there are only two in Spain. If you want Chinese fans to watch more games, there have to be more than two clasicos every season.’
But, domestically, who would favour that? A never-ending collision of the biggest names, so that the fixture is watered down, much like Rangers and Celtic. The Old Firm met five times this season, six times in 2016-17. The arrival of Steven Gerrard may command attention but, increasingly, the game has lost its meaning.
As Barcelona and Real Madrid would, if it was played six times a year; as Manchester United and Liverpool would were it manipulated to be the closer to every season. Here comes another one, just like the other one. Who cares?
To keep the biggest games back would risk making them redun- dant, too. Manchester City won the league from five games out this season. Manchester United have also done that in the Premier League era. So what if their run down the home straight had included meetings with Liverpool, Chelsea and Arsenal? Dead rubbers all.
Glenn Hoddle felt that his predecessor as England manager, Terry Venables, stitched him up in the fixture planning meeting for the 1998 World Cup qualifiers. England were scheduled to go to Italy in the last game. Hoddle thought that Venables had left him facing a daunting cup final.
VEnABLES saw it differently. If England did their job, he reasoned, they could be through and their toughest fixture would be meaningless. If the group was still live, then at least England would know what they had to do, and it wouldn’t matter, home or away. He was right.
Despite losing to Italy at Wembley, England went to Rome knowing they needed a point to qualify — and got a 0-0 draw. Had they won at home, the away fixture would have been irrelevant.
The detail of the way the Premier League programme is arranged came out in the tender document for broadcast rights for seasons 2019-20 to 2021-22. It promises rights holders that there will be at least one match between ‘top six’ clubs — a calculation now taken over three seasons, to avoid anomalies like Chelsea’s 10th-place finish — across 26 weekend fixture programmes, but this will always exclude opening weekend and the final round of games. Understandably so.
The Premier League does not need to capture the imagination of the public in its first week — a summer of new signings and managerial changes, plus the enduring optimism of fans, will do that.
Equally, when the 38th game comes around, the destination of the title, relegation issues, and European qualification has the potential to make even the most mundane encounter captivating.
It is in the midst of winter, when reality has dawned, a predictable pattern is emerging and there is disillusionment with a competition that often divides from richest to poorest, that the Premier League needs to keep the fire alive.
Some think this is the best in the world. It isn’t. But it is the most successful. And to be that it has to be the best run, the best planned, have the strongest vision, know exactly what it is, and what it must deliver. And each season it does that beautifully. What did we think? That this was all the work of a random fixture generator?
If the Premier League has a smart computer, it has smarter people operating it. That’s why the other leagues scramble just to keep up.