Premier League's richest tighten grip after season of slow-burn stories

Well, we made it then. It was the worst of times. And either side of that, it was also the worst of times. Professional sport has never staged anything quite like the football season just past, 11 months of competition capped by that midsummer interlude where suddenly televised football became a contractual bind cranked out through gritted teeth to pay the bills, Premier League clubs going through the motions like a leather-thonged private dancer making eyes at the table of TV execs in hope of a second series.

Plague, death and economic collapse aside, from a sporting point of view the most remarkable part of the 2019-20 Premier League season was that it maintained a degree of uniform quality throughout. As ever the level of competition was decent, not bad, OK; a reliable advert for the homogenised global pop culture product that is elite level English football.

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Liverpool supporters will rejoice in the spectacle of one of the great champion teams of the last quarter century. At the other end of the table Aston Villa’s survival was an absorbing piece of theatre. But for the rest of the field this was a slow-burn, unremarkable season, with little in the way of surprise, innovation, or genuine social mobility.

Never mind the shrill dramas of Super Final Sunday. The four wealthiest clubs at the start of the season are the four clubs that will play in the Champions League next year. Not, it should be said, in exactly corresponding order. Liverpool defied a £100m revenue shortfall to finish 33 points clear of No 1 rich-listers Manchester United. So there’s that.

Otherwise there is little in the final Premier League table that couldn’t have emerged from an algorithm based on income and recent performances. Arsenal and West Ham underachieved on a revenue-to-points basis. Burnley continue to punch above their status. Sheffield United looked an excellent team.

There were spikes of unruliness: Norwich beat Manchester City and Watford beat Liverpool. But Norwich were also relegated after one hapless season, while Watford’s successful attempt to game the system finally choked on its own cuteness.

At the end of which the gap between first and 10th place was 45 points, maintaining an average 10 point increase in the gap between those places in the last four years, compared to the previous decade. The gap between first and fourth was 33 points, compared to 27 the year before, and 25, 17 and 15 in the three years before that.

This sense of settled hierarchies becomes more pronounced every year. It should be a source of concern that there are currently no more than four teams in the league who might even contemplate winning it. In the circles beyond it is a fair guess to say more than 90% of current professional clubs have zero chance of winning the Premier League title ever again, barring some deus ex machina takeover by an unregulated spendthrift billionaire.

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Does this matter? It is more open at the top than most other European leagues. Juventus have just won a ninth consecutive domestic title. Bayern Munich are up to eight. Paris Saint-Germain wield a similar tyranny in Ligue 1.

At the same time this gap is likely to become more pronounced in all the major leagues, as revenue streams dry up, and as access to the Champions League becomes a dividing line between the drowned and the saved. Those who have gambled on debt versus income are in for a dose of enforced austerity. The status of the Premier League as a premium global product will rest for now on those established powers, their ability to produce and procure star players.

It should be said the champions look in excellent health. Liverpool are a powerful machine, in need of little more than a service and the odd high-end spare part. It would be a surprise not to see the title retained, and the sense of a genuine act of dynasty-building confirmed.

Manchester City will be stronger. Courtroom vindication will provide both impetus and, no doubt, a mild flood of money to spend. Beyond which it is hard not to conclude that this has been a poor Premier League field, as evidenced by the fact Leicester’s pre-Christmas cavaliers were Liverpool’s closest challengers all season.

There has been some hopeful talk that Manchester United might be a genuine force next year, something that would seem more likely if the Premier League were a five-a-side competition. Unfortunately it is also necessary to field a fully competent backline. Chelsea have riches in midfield and some exciting new arrivals. Both of these teams will have their hand strengthened by a seat at the top table in a time of retrenchment elsewhere

Further down it seems likely financial caution will only increase the sense of leagues within leagues. Tottenham and Arsenal, weakened by the financial slowdown, look some way off now. The sense of a large block of clubs hanging in there, content simply to harvest the broadcast money, will become ever more profound.

Perhaps a less spendthrift environment will reinforce the idea that chemistry, careful coaching and good husbandry is still the best way to succeed.

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Leeds’ arrival will provide the league with a distinctive on-field presence, and Marcelo Bielsa with the funds to explore the limits of his systems-based football.

And despite that sense of middling standards, the Premier League has been tactically interesting this year. For the first time since the first Premier League season none of the top three goalscorers played for the top three clubs, a measure perhaps of the way the angles and rhythms of attack have broadened out. The full-back role continued to evolve, to the extent Trent Alexander-Arnold probably requires a new designation, right-back giving way to ball-strike-flank-gallop-man, or right-side-wing-creation-vector.

For now domestic football will be hugely glad of the extended break, with the new season not due to start until 12 September.

Before then we have the prospect of a 10-week summer transfer window; the progress of which is likely to confirm that sense of hierarchies reinforced, of spenders versus savers, and of a league being pulled a little further apart at both ends.