Morning all.
There’s a lot of terrible crap on TV these days, but I just want to go on record to say that I’d rather sit through 1000 episodes of Phil Collins and Maroon5 doing soulless acoustic versions of every song I ever loved than watch a single second of the upcoming Netflix show about Man City doing the treble (small t, important).
It’s quite funny when I see Arsenal fans talk about where they would prefer the title to end up if we don’t win it. Obviously, the ideal scenario is that we do and we don’t have to endure any kind of Hobson’s Choice situation, but if not, I’d rather Liverpool win it than City.
On the one hand, I get how it’s easier to just say ‘Pfff, it doesn’t mean anything’ if it’s another one for Pep and his band of cronies – from boardroom to pitch. If you are terminally online, and find yourself engaged in the relentless and tedious back and forth that seems to be 99% of what football Twitter is these days, I can also understand why you might find some Liverpool fans a pain in the hole who would be absolutely unbearable if they won the league.
The obvious solution of ‘logging off’ and spending time doing something else other than Twitter makes dealing with that pretty easy, but it’s not for everyone. Nevertheless, as much as I understand that point of view about how you can just put a City title win in a box labelled ‘Who gives a shit?’, I also feel like that kinda gives them what they want too.
That is part of their plan. For their dominance to become so ingrained in the psyche of football fans that people just stop bothering to talk about how it has all been built. With expertise and strategy and with some of the best people in football, no question, but with that giant asterisk beside it the entire time (which is 115 small asterisks melted down into one).
City are a footballing megacorp. The Amazon of the Premier League. You don’t need to do much in terms of research to know that their practices are sketchy, to say the least, but on the other hand you can get 48 toilet rolls for £4.99, delivered same day by some poor bloke on minimum wage who isn’t allowed a lunch break and has to piss in a bottle or AI Jeff Bezos will dock his pay-packet and make him stock warehouse shelves until he collapses. He may, or may not, be allowed medical treatment at that point.
Which is why, if it’s not us, I’d rather it was Liverpool. Is it because our billionaire American owners are more pure and wholesome than City’s? Is it because we’re entitled to take the moral high ground? No. There are uncomfortable truths for almost every football fan to deal with these days, particularly in the Premier League where the race for success is now inextricably linked to compromising your values to generate as much revenue as you possibly can.
Blame Roman Abramovich for that. Blame Chelsea. And blame Man City who took it to a new level. And look, if it wasn’t Abramovich it would have been someone else. If it wasn’t Chelsea it would have been some other club. Maybe Arsenal. Who knows? So blame the Premier League too and its ‘rules’ about fit and proper owners. They never gave a shit, it was always about changing a revenue stream into a river of cash, so here we are at the inevitable point years later when football clubs that existed in communities for years are the playthings of nation states and oligarchs and billionaires and venture capitalists of dubious financial and personal backgrounds.
This is the Premier League. And this is the league I desperately want us to win. But there are levels, and I think I see Arsenal more aligned with Liverpool in terms of being competitors. We’re not really a mom and pop store trying to fend off the threat of Walmart (Hi Stan!), but it always felt to me that it gave hope to the rest of us if a team like Liverpool could win titles in this Man City era.
The reality is, whoever wins it if it’s not us, I’ll turn the TV off, I’ll avoid Match of the Day, I’ll very carefully select my online reading so as not to be exposed to the joy of others while dealing with disappointment of my own. But like all of you, I’ll need to pick myself up and go again next season and if it’s on the back of City winning 6 of the last 7, that’s more difficult than if there’s a chink in the armour, a crack in the Amazon City HQ because another side has won it.
Anyway, Mikel Arteta and this very good team of ours could make all of that completely redundant, in which case I will be a smug fucker until next May. Which is entirely the remit and right of any football fan.
Till tomorrow.