It is an obscenity. It is an abomination. It is lunacy. It is a wind-up, isn't it? These are just some of the reactions I have heard first-hand in recent days about the English so-called Premier League's plans to improve its product offering. I have expressed many of them myself over the past few days, as I have tried to absorb the full impact of the announcement that the 20 so-called top teams in England (many of which somehow manage to persuade themselves that they are part of the most exciting league in the world despite the mind-numbing mediocrity of much of the football they purvey, and the fact that hardly anyone other than Arsenal and Manchester United have won the league title in the years since the 'Premier League' was created) have unanimously agreed to consider adding an extra round of fixtures to the league calendar.
These fixtures will be chosen at random, in the manner of a cup draw, with the top five clubs seeded (of course) to make the playing field even more uneven than it already is, and will be played in a series of cities around the world. These cities will, we are told, breathlessly outbid each other for the vast privilege of welcoming into their hearts the league's preening, self-regarding, publicly urinating, fornicating and vomiting multi-millionaires.
There are so many things wrong with this proposal that it is difficult to know where to start pulling at the loose threads that keep it hanging together. It destroys the purity of league football, is a good one to start with. Except, hang on a minute, didn't we say that about the introduction of 'play-offs' in England's lower leagues, which are nothing more than sudden death cup ties tacked on to the end of a 46-game league season, to sustain 'excitement' beyond mid-season, and, coincidentally, generate large amounts of cash?
And, oh, how about the Scottishpremierleague [sic]'s ludicrous introduction of a split after its 33rd round of matches, so the top six and the bottom six generate even more 'excitement' artificially than they would have done naturally? I thought that that was ridiculous when it first happened, and it looks even more ridiculous with the passage of time. Explaining to football historians in a hundred years how a team with 43 points at the end of the season finished below one with 42 would test the powers of a particularly casuistical Jesuit on a good day. Except, by then, probably, people will be so engrossed in the excitement being generated by the English Premier League's extra round of 42 international matches that Scottish football will matter even less then that it does now.
It introduces a random element into the equation? See my comments of a few lines ago. So do play-offs.
It will enable clubs to expand their global profile? Dear me. Wigan Athletic, Derby County, Reading, Birmingham City, Blackburn Rovers, etc, barely have a profile beyond the borders of their own town.
If we don't do it, someone else will? You could write a thesis on the illogicality and immorality embedded in this one. 'Just because everyone else is doing something doesn't mean it's right,' is a lesson hammered into me from my fundamentalist RC upbringing.
And did you notice the other quirk, coming from the league's chief executive, Richard Scudamore? After a period of full consultation over the next two and a half years, the draw for the first round of matches will take place a few days after the end of the 2009-10 season. That sounds pretty much to me like the decision has already been made, and that the consultation is a pure sop.
A friend of mine, who is a Spurs fan, a devoted Spurs fan, used the obscenity word in a brief conversation on the subject last night, and he suggested it might be the tipping point at which he washes his hand of football, surrenders his season ticket, and walks away.
'Football has sold its soul,' I started to say in response. But then I stopped. Football sold its soul a LONG time ago. Maybe it started with the World Cup in Mexico in 1970, when games were played at high altitude, in noonday sunshine, for the benefit of of television viewers in Europe. The wholesale flogging of the game to Sky, which generated the money that brought the world's 'best' players to the English top flight (plus the likes of Peter Crouch, Paul Robinson, Kevin Davies, Nicky Shorey, Shaun Wright-Philips, Steve Sidwell and other leading luminaries of the talentless) certainly carried the process forward, as did the awarding of the 1994 World Cup to the USA, and the 2002 version to Japan/Korea.
The late great US comedian Bill Hicks would have had something to say about it, were he still around today. I can think of no better way to sum it up than to use the words he deployed to explain the rise to prominence of the likes of MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice. Football is sucking Satan's cock. And it's not a pretty sight.
