Manchester City may be in an era of dominance on the pitch right now, but this kind of spell has an expiration date.
So that’s all per year. There was faint hope that the Premier League name race could extend into the final week of the season, however, in the end, Arsenal did not have enough to get close to the line as the Manchester City giants continued to advance.
And with this Premier League name win comes a reopening of the verbal exchange about how exactly they did it and the ethics of it all, all back in their web bunkers, throwing their verbal grenades at others, reviews already fully formed and perfectly repeated. The debate will continue indefinitely.
And that will happen regardless of the final results of the 115 charges brought against the club for breaching FFP rules and failing to cooperate with the Premier League investigation. This in no way gives the impression that it will be definitively resolved. Just like The Football itself. We all have our reviews on every bit of detail, and the number of reviews that will most likely be replaced (in fact, among which we percentage them online) will probably be incredibly small.
With five of the last six Premier League titles, Manchester City are poised to be the most successful team in league history, but they have yet to do so. Liverpool won five league titles out of six between 1979 and 1984, winning the Cup twice that time. Manchester United did the same between 1996 and 2001, winning the Champions League once.
But if they get it back next season, the first team to win 4 straight English titles and achieve six out of seven in the process, it will look pretty indisputable, especially if they claim the Champions League against Inter next month.
It deserves to be perfectly evident that football enthusiasts will stick to the party lines on this issue. Liverpool enthusiasts will argue that the First Division was significantly more egalitarian in the early 1980s, before advertising and television revenues opened up a massive gap between the haves and the haves. -Not from the elite. Manchester United enthusiasts would say that the Champions League is significantly harder to win than the European Cup. Manchester City enthusiasts would say they are about to sign for those two clubs, and with no end in sight.
It is equally evident that supporters of rival clubs will begin to argue that monopolies are a smart thing to do when they are appropriated, and that they are a bad thing when they don’t show too many symptoms of having one now. But it’s going to the heart of a much more vital argument than all this: what do we need football to be?How vital is competitive equilibrium?To what extent would we disrupt the grass of free market capital if that began to defraud this equilibrium?
Regardless of the intelligence and evil of how Manchester City came to such dominance over the rest of the Premier League, here we are and it’s probably no coincidence that those periods of dominance have come at a time when money has come to dominate the narrative. of the game.
For decades, regulations and regulations have downplayed the worst excesses of the free market in the game itself, which has had a massive effect on the festival within the leagues. Arsenal enthusiasts might argue that their era of dominance under Herbert Chapman with 3 consecutive league names from 1930 to 1933 deserves to be included as an era of dominance at the forefront of English football history if you consider this was the global one they started on. among the bottom nine of the table. Winning the name of the championship 3 years in a row in this world championship has been an achievement. Huddersfield Town fans, who scored the same hat-trick with Chapman between 1923 and 1926, can nod their heads.
Slowly, those regulations were eliminated as part of a broader update in the postwar years. The maximum salary pegged players’ salaries to about twice the average salary of a commercial worker until 1939, but dropped to about a third more after the war. , when the shortage of hard work drove up wages and the maximum football wage was not maintained and abolished in 1961. Low risk of strike. Wages began to rise and fares moved with them.
In 1983, the practice of sharing profits from the door of league matches ended and the advent of live television broadcasting in the same year brought a new source of profit that would replace the game forever. year for two years. Within a decade, it was £60 million a year for five years. It is now worth £1. 6 billion a year. Running a football club has a millionaire’s game. Then it has become a game of billionaires. Lately it’s somewhere between a billionaire’s game and a nation-state game.
The Premier League is already fully aware of the importance of a safe competitive balance. For the 2021/22 season, the highest paid club (Manchester City) won 1. 6 times the lowest (Norwich City). The 20 clubs get a fundamental equivalent payment from TV rights, which were worth around £84m last season, and clubs earn more amounts depending on how they decide on national television, and that’s relatively equal. In Italy, the highest paid club (Inter) won 3. 2 times that of Venezia, the lowest paid club in Serie A. In Spain, Real Madrid and Barcelona earned 3. 5 times the amount of the 3 lowest paid clubs in LaLiga.
But that didn’t stop Manchester City, just like it didn’t stop Manchester United before them, so if the Premier League doesn’t need the Premier League to become League One, where are they going to set the bar?Financial fair play has been the playing field in recent years, with Manchester City enthusiasts claiming it was created to protect a small number of established clubs.
The Premier League already knows that this festival aura, and many would say it’s just an aura, given that the number of clubs that can realistically win the league has shrunk for years, is one of the main points why it has left other European countries far behind in terms of streaming revenue. In fact, it is possible that the accusations against Manchester City address this factor in the most frontal way possible.
City may seem unstoppable at the moment, but all other periods of dominance in English football history have come to an end at some point. Fans of rival clubs are already eagerly awaiting the moment when Pep Guardiola leaves the club with the feeling that he will be offering other clubs the opportunity to catch up, as happened with Manchester United after the retirement and early departure of Alex Ferguson from Matt Busby, or at Leeds after Don Revie.
There is reason to be suspicious of this opinion. After all, City will choose from the world’s most productive coaches to upgrade Guardiola, and the wallet will remain as deep as ever.
But it’s also worth remembering that Manchester United has been exceptionally poorly controlled in recent years, but will soon be under new ownership (in part?). Nor do we know what you can achieve with Todd Boehly and Clearlake, even if the first symptoms are not good. Neither they nor Liverpool will be as bad as they have been. for long periods in 2022/23.
Newcastle is particularly improved, albeit under the ownership of some other state media. Arsenal have shown that it is possible to succeed in the outdoor name of the four smartest. It is possibly an exception and not the norm.
Until some form of really extensive regulatory update arrives, it can only be up to those clubs, and others, to find a way around this giant on the field. Financial inequality existed in English football long before Sheikh Mansour or even Roman. Abramovich entered the scene.
And all of this raises another question for supporters of City’s rivals about what follows this era of dominance: do you just want to dominate the league yourselves or do you want something more akin to a real box game for all clubs?
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