I wrote something along these lines a few months ago on another social media site. I gave my permission for it to be forwarded to Steve Parish by a mutual friend.
My theme was how although I still loved football, the Premier League was becoming a huge turn off. Rigged in favour of the ' big clubs ' .
There's a certain irony in as much as Palace have been so successful ( albeit in cup competitions ) at the same time as I've grown steadily more disillusioned with league football.
And of course it's that success that have fed those bigger clubs as our players become transfer targets for them.
I couldn't agree more. Palace winning the FA Cup would have shook the very ground under my young feet in 1990. I was gutted for years afterwards! In 2016 I found going to Wembley even more of a hassle then usual but was surprised at the emotions it all stirred once I got there, although a lot of that was to do with suddenly looking back at 1990, I think. By the time we won it, I didn't feel remotely as strongly about it. Some of that is being older, having other things to worry about, and the novelty wearing off, but a lot of it is to do with falling so out of love with top level professional football.
I feel like I'm constantly telling myself that just because I might be able to articulate sensible objections to something doesn't mean I'm not just being a grumpy old man when I complain about it. It's not like top level football is struggling to draw in the punters, so perhaps it's just me who dislikes it. It's quite possible that the problem is with me, not with football.
But then I list all the things I dislike, and I don't feel like I'm being unreasonable. The soullessness of it. The unrelenting, overblown marketing. The cost. The unseemly, totally unrelatable money they throw around. The mindless, hypocritical corporate virtue signaling on political and social issues. Dubious foreign states buying into English football with no opposition at all. The endless greed.
Then there's the game itself. VAR is an irreversible f***ing travesty, as is the pandering to players going to ground under minimal contact. What is now widely accepted as a player having been 'fouled' used to be considered despicable cheating that we wouldn't tolerate in our culture. That's why the rest of the world liked our football. The idea that a player can legitimately 'earn' a free kick or penalty is a modern sickness, born of the mindset that it's all about what you can get rather than how you conduct yourself. All of it gets washed over by the smiley blandness of the TV firms, who care far more about never damaging the value of the product than the game itself. It's a dramatic thing to say, but I feel like the great fundamental social and personal value of the game to our society is being eroded by the rewards and lack of objections to the shitty way it is played now.
Finally, the actual major competitions are becoming so pointless, as the vast majority of participants can never, ever win them. It's mad, but we just accept it. The same very small number of teams have dominated in the major European leagues for decades. They are so far out of reach of the rest that they now want only to play each other. Their dominance is so depressing that many of us would be happy enough to see them go. How is that a healthy, happy state of affairs?!
A big feature of unregulated open markets is that an increasingly small group of the rich get richer all the time, and increasingly further away from the rest. This is established economics. It's not like football couldn't have seen it coming. This is the inevitable end game. The same small number of teams drain the best players from the smaller teams just to stockpile talent. There are at least two or three title-challenging XIs sat on the bench or in the stands come kick off every match day. How is that okay?
I've got no problem with one club being bigger and wealthier than the next. In one respect the likes of Arsenal and Liverpool are simply inheriting the benefits of the labours of their predecessors, the same way you might have a better inheritance than me if your parents did better than mine. The difference is that if I do better than you in this life, my kids might get at least as good an inheritance as yours. It's all to play for. Football isn't like that. It's locked. The big clubs can run themselves badly and still be in the elite, the likes of us can run ourselves well and never get there. That's increasingly playing out on the pitch.
The most lauded, apparently successful smaller top flight clubs are the likes of Brighton, Bournemouth, and Brentford, and their whole approach is to develop players for the big boys! They literally rely on reinforcing the status quo to exist. That's the f***ing aspiration, is it? Jesus. Surely they are a warning, a red flag?
Mostly though, the thing that gets me is how little fuss and objection there is to all this. The grounds are sold out, despite the ticket costs and f***ing around with kick off times. Is that brainwashing? Are we increasingly conditioned or resigned to it? Or is it just so hard to let go of something that used to be so good?
Or am I just a grumpy old man after all?! 😆
Wales
