The coefficient is safe. The coefficient is yours. You’re going home with the coefficient. But perhaps not, on this evidence, with the microwave, the washing machine or the jet ski.
England’s soccer shame. Premier League in EURO MELTDOWN. Robot-ball crisis: how Arteta’s Arsenal destroyed all that is good and true, including the ploughman’s lunch and probably Woolworths. This kind of stuff has begun to do the rounds after this week’s Champions League last-16 matches.
For English football it is a striking executive summary. Six Premier League teams played the first legs of their last-16 ties on Tuesday and Wednesday. End result: four defeats and two draws. Three of those defeats were semi-thrashings by three goals. Newcastle played well against strong opponents. Nobody else did. Only Arsenal and Liverpool look more likely than not to get to the quarter-finals.
Why has this happened? Is it actually a bad thing? How does it explain not only the complex, self-limiting dynamics of elite club football, but also the fact England are less likely to win the World Cup this summer than most people seem to assume? Maybe, who knows, it doesn’t explain any of these things [narrator’s voice: it does].
There is an obvious counterpoint. It’s still half-time. Take a breath. Mush an orange segment into your front teeth. Manchester City and Chelsea are capable of scoring three goals at home next week. Newcastle can get a draw at the Camp Nou. Tottenham … well, OK, Tottenham. But their opponents have flaws too, and football is increasingly swing-prone.
Either way, the Premier League will still probably end up with two teams in the last eight. This seems an objectively reasonable outcome. The Champions League is contested by 55 Uefa members. The notion of six English teams in the quarter-finals should be deeply offputting to anyone who likes the idea of robust competition or a fun run of games to watch on TV.
The sense of collective failure in train springs solely from finance. The Premier League generates an estimated £6.5bn in annual revenue, almost twice as much as La Liga. Six of the top 10 richest clubs in the world are English. The Premier League is a net importer of talent and expertise. Its wealth is used not just to strengthen itself but to aggressively diminish other domestic leagues.
Winning against the very best European teams is another matter. Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Paris Saint-Germain top the rich list right now. But from a structural perspective, English clubs should expect to pad out the late stages and to walk the Uefa coefficient race (as is currently the case), thereby racking up yet more seats at the table.
But there are two points worth making. First, this is a pretty middling iteration of the Premier League. The general standard is high, if only because so much talent is assembled. Even a poorly built team full of elite footballers is still a team full of elite footballers. But it lacks exhilarating peaks. There are no self-evidently elite, generational acts of team-building in train here, no era-definers, no shadows of greatness being born. Not yet, anyway.
This is also structural. Which of these English clubs actually gives the impression of running to its full capacity? The league is defined instead by unregulated ownership, incoherent splurges and a basic lack of care, patience or a coherent native coaching culture.
Instead it is messy and overheated. Teams are built in the way you might try to make a sandwich by simply hurling handfuls of high-end ingredients at the kitchen counter until by default some of them coalesce randomly into a sandwich-shaped entity, a mess of truffle shavings, rocket, elite baguette, but outside this forgotten piles of discarded Iberico ham, slabs of aged sheep cheese under the table, an entire rotisserie pheasant down the back of the fridge.
Chelsea are the perfect example, a team that look laden with talent one moment and laughably brittle the next. There is a basic creepiness about this version. The same colours, songs, optics. But what is it exactly? A Brewster’s Millions-style feat of extreme wastefulness? A revolving content carousel, hedge-fund ball, a real time experiment in splurging billions on random human talent units?
Hardly surprising that when you plonk these constructs down next to something built from similar resources, but with just a little more care and a sense of a defining culture, they may fall short in the final reckoning.
The second point is that the rest of Europe will celebrate this, and with good reason. What would it matter if the Premier League succeeds on this stage, because the Premier League is essentially meaningless. What does it represent? Effective salesmanship. A visible aggregation of other people’s talent. A conglomeration of shell companies.
Buying talented people and divvying out laundry isn’t a sporting culture. There are still no identifiable Premier League tactics beyond a borrowed model of Pep-ball and some revivalist folk memory of power and pace. The Premier League is a fine piece of staging. But who does this satisfy, or vindicate? How much is English football really contributing to this spectacle, beyond some stadiums and a heritage brand?
Certainly little in terms of star players or coaching expertise. In games played this week by English clubs, English-reared players made up a minority in every case compared with players produced by their opposing club nationality, except for Newcastle whose 10 Englishmen (plus one for their opponents) were matched by Barcelona’s 11 Spanish players.
This is where the World Cup starts to cast its shadow just a little. The idea that England has a golden hand of super-talents right now has often been overblown, bound up in insularity and exceptionalism. The reality is England have struggled to win tournaments because the structure doesn’t produce and nurture the same volume of high-level players; or when it does it produces them unevenly, haphazardly and with no grooved template or pattern.
There is still no clear English way of playing, because, frankly, the Premier League doesn’t need it. Yeah, we can buy one of those. Whereas nations that actually win things tend to do so in ways that express something about the structures beneath. Even the most chaotic elite clubs in Spain will stick to a playing culture, and produce the backbone of a coherent national team, while strapping into place their own prefab stars.
For now it is objectively good for the game that other leagues can match the loudest, most spendthrift presence in the room. Maybe, just maybe, we’re not actually the good guys here. Maybe the real crisis would be English teams winning these games. Plus, should it fall short this season the Premier League will be forced to raise standards, to insist on stable ownership and sensible spending, on nursing its own football culture. Only joking. It will instead buy your players and lure away your coaches. Drink it in while you can. We’re coming for you one way or another.