Ken Early: Opening weekend of the Premier League showed new tolerance for blatant fouls

Manchester United didn’t get what they wanted on the Premier League’s opening weekend, except further confirmation that they remain the most reliably watchable team in the game. Everything that happened at Old Trafford on Sunday afternoon was pure theatre.

There was Cristiano Ronaldo curling his lip in disdain as he watched the opening exchanges from the bench, there was the crowd’s dawning horror as they realised that Brighton were actually the better team, then the ice-bucket shock of Brighton’s two quick goals. We saw Erik ten Hag forced to turn to Ronaldo to save the day, we had the psychodrama of Marcus Rashford’s misses and United’s vain surge, all culminating in Brighton’s first-ever win at Old Trafford. That’s Manchester United: you just can’t take your eyes off these guys for a second.

At least that’s how it is for the 700 million-odd of us United already count as ‘followers’ (as distinct from ‘fans’). The finer elements of the drama might not be so apparent to seven billion or so new or casual fans, who might have taken this for an ordinary sort of game in which a mediocre team in red lost to a more-accomplished blue-and-white rival. How to open these people’s eyes to what they’re missing?

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20 years ago Premier League owners all believed the Asian market was the future, but Covid and the increasing chill of UK-China relations have changed the calculus. This year’s summer tours saw a renewed focus on the anglophone sphere, with eight of the ten Premier League clubs who toured outside Europe visiting the USA and Australia. Thailand (Liverpool and Manchester United), Singapore (Liverpool and Crystal Palace), and South Korea (Tottenham) were the only Asian countries toured.

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The current strategy is about increasing penetration in the English-speaking markets, but tours can only achieve so much. Clubs have been playing friendlies in Dallas or Orlando for years without threatening to capture much of the American imagination. Now they have more sophisticated tools at their disposal.

Arsenal are not the first club to open their doors to the All Or Nothing documentary series, but they might be the first to do so with successful results. Maybe it’s because Arsenal’s team now consists of the first generation of players who have been marinating in the culture of reality TV since birth, maybe it’s just Mikel Arteta’s way with a flipchart: whatever the reason, their new show on Amazon Prime is surprisingly engaging.

The obvious model here is Formula 1′s Drive To Survive Netflix series, which is credited with launching F1 into the American cultural mainstream. People who didn’t care about the sport when they saw it as a bunch of corporations competing to see who could build the best car suddenly got interested when they got to know the people involved.

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Likewise you can imagine Arsenal meaning a little more to people who have seen how the whole club is affected by the victories and the defeats, who have watched Alexandre Lacazette do his best to coax a word out of the shy Nuno Tavares, who can imagine what a heartsink it must be for Arteta to see Josh Kroenke smiling at him across the breakfast room, and who realise how much effort he puts into coming up with concepts for his often-stilted but always-earnest motivational team talks. Who knows - some might even be inclined to have mercy on Aaron Ramsdale when he inevitably makes a mistake now that they’ve seen how anxiously his parents watch him from the stand.

Relatable narrative content is only one prong of the Premier League’s new strategy for winning hearts and minds. The other we can call Murderball.

Last week the league gave notice of some rule changes for the new season - they all sounded like small details: some clarifications around the interpretation of offside, where goalkeepers can put their feet during penalties, and so on. They forgot to mention the biggest change: in the Premier League it is no longer a foul to run up behind an opponent and knock them down while making no effort to play the ball.

Since last year’s “Let it Flow” initiative we’ve grown used to players getting away with violent, potential red card fouls. Just this weekend we had Scott McTominay on Moises Caicedo (yellow), Kenny Tete on Luis Diaz (yellow) and Vladimir Coufal on Jack Grealish (“play on!”).

Now it looks as though many ordinary fouls are no longer even considered fouls. The weekend saw player after player knocked over by an opponent barging into their space from behind, and clearly assuming they had won a free kick, only to be ignored by the referee. Let It Flow has evolved to the next level. Nobody likes frequent stoppages or the referees who whistle for them... so what if we as referees just sort of... stepped out of the way?

Naturally, the new dispensation was quickly mired in controversy. Refs have discretion to turn a blind eye to incidents between the boxes, where Var only gets involved if there is serious foul play. At Old Trafford the thing that had been happening all weekend finally happened in one of the boxes, as Lisandro Martinez knocked Danny Welbeck down with a barge from behind for what was an obvious penalty.

Replays confirmed that Martinez had got nowhere near the ball, in fact had not even tried to go for it. Pushing someone over from behind while making no effort to get the ball has always been a foul in football - until now, apparently. The Var check noticed no foul.

So English referees have decided that, when it comes to enforcement, less is more. Fifa and Uefa, meanwhile will continue to use the regular rules, where pushing someone over from behind is a foul. Let’s hope Premier League players can remember how the game is still played in the rest of the world when they head out to Qatar in November.

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In the meantime some in England might be pleased with the new direction their league seems to be taking: no more rolling around, get on with it! They should remember that the rules developed this way for a reason. The theory that a game with few stoppages is an entertaining one has to be balanced against the fact that it doesn’t take a lot of skill to barge someone over from behind.

If defenders are allowed to solve problems by smashing into the back of people, the game won’t “flow” faster. On the contrary it will become slower, less skilful, and more dangerous, as it was at the 1990 World Cup. That was when Fifa decided the laws of the game had to change.

In England they now seem to think of these rules as just so much red tape, but their efforts to create a faster and more furious form of football will end up reminding us why we have the rules in the first place.