English top flight? Not worth getting beers out fridge for

Great managers. Great players. Great clubs. Just no greatness.

Whatever happened to English football? As the great BB King said, the thrill is gone.

It hit home, dipping in and out of the Europa League Final the other night. The fact that’s all it was.

No more than a passing interest in how Manchester United did in a European final. Not making it appointment viewing.

Then realising that even when it was holding my attention for more than 30 seconds at a time, I actually found myself rooting for Ajax.

Rooting for their ethos, their philosophy, the callowness of their youth.

Their lack of a sneering cynicism, the complete inferiority of their traditional superiority complex.

And realising exactly how distant I felt, how disenfranchised, from the representatives of a game which has had me in its thrall for most of my 49 years. Sad, right? Or is it just me? Since I was a kid, since the days of those brilliant Leeds side of the early 70s, the transition to the dominance of King Kenny’s Liverpool, the Sir Fergie years at Man U, the mercury of Keegan’s Newcastle, there has always been something in it for me. Something to make me not want to miss any of it.

To reach for the Pink on a Saturday night, or teletext, or the Sky Sports app and see who scored when, who played where.

And not just for the sheer parochialism – although that always had a lot to do with it. Teams with Scots first, big picture next.

These days though? A cursory glance. Maybe less. Match of the Day can sit on the planner for days at a time.

What used to be Super Sunday is now just… well, Sunday. Like any other Sunday. Spent with the family, happily oblivious to fixtures which used to see you chill the six-pack and shut the blinds in anticipation.

It’s not falling out of love with football. It’s just falling out of love with THEIR football.

Because, really, what’s left to love? Are you watching out of duty, or are you watching out of desire, passion, affection?

Sure, Spurs are easy on the eye, the presence and charisma of Guardiola, Conte and Klopp in the dugouts is intriguing. There are plenty of redeeming features.

But enough to overcome the obsession with money and protectionism? The globalisation? The incalculable obscenity of the wages?

The celebration of finishing fourth because it’s actually all that matters? The “packaging” of the “product”?

The affinity you used to feel, for me, came because it felt like a game within reach. Not just geographically but financially, spiritually.

The clubs felt real, they still felt like part of their constituent communities. Now they’re corporations at the heart of a multi-billion pound industry.

If you’re in it? You don’t care about how your perceived, just that you’re accessing the wealth.

And if you’re on the outside of it? All you care about is being in it. Hence you get clubs like Reading burning through three foreign owners in five years in the wake of John Madejski, trying to get past the rope on the door.

The club has no intrinsic value to these people, it’s just a vessel to cross the border.

Nor does the game, when you listen to Jose Mourinho, a man whose twinkling eye has turned a glassy grey.

In a season of unrelenting mediocrity for Man U, he’s won two trophies and got them into to the Champions League.

And all he can do when he does it is gloat about how pragmatic he is and why the “poets” of the game can eat his dirt. But like it or not, it’s a prevailing wind for all of them.

The sad thing about watching that Ajax team the other night was that you know it has no chance of surviving, of building itself into something special the way they were able to do in 1995.

Because the bottom line is a West Brom or a Crystal Palace or a Stoke City could buy and sell their entire squad.

If Bournemouth can pay 130 grand a week to Jermaine Defoe, nearly seven million a year, then you just know stellar teenagers like Matthijs de Ligt or Kasper Dolberg will get hoovered up into the machine soon enough and how will they be able to resist?

Maybe if these kids were from our own doorstep, I might feel different.

Maybe if Antonio Conte brings out a genius in Billy Gilmour or Andy Robertson turns out to be Jurgen Klopp’s greatest ever signing, it’ l l reignite the fire.

It’s doubtful though because how do you love a game and a league where even enough just never seems to be enough?

It feels like it’s not that long since this column said similar about the Champions League eating itself with its rich-get-richer, big-get-bigger mindset.

Sure, you’ll tune into the Final next Saturday night and hope it’s a belter but be honest, apart from the Celtic games and that incredible Monaco-Barcelona game, how engaged have you been in the journey to get to Cardiff?

When the ‘ illions’ begin with a B instead of an M, it creates a reality void for me, a chasm which I’m not sure I’ll ever want to bridge.