Premier League: Vulnerabilities add to intrigue of ‘Top Six’ sides

What would you like a league table to look like at the end of the season? Forget who you support, forget who you dislike, forget personalities and tactics and prejudices, if you turned up in an alien land and were given a subscription to watch every game in their league season, what would be your ideal?

Most people, I’m guessing, would want it to be tight, would want the season to go down to the wire to sustain the interest, maybe so that on the final day every team would have a chance of success.

Except, might that not suggest a level of mediocrity? What you definitely would not want is identikit teams of perfectly matched robots going through familiar patterns.

Heroic resistance

You would want players and managers to be distinctive, to have personalities, strengths and weaknesses, to have good days and bad days. You would want mistakes and flashes of genius, you would want heroic resistance and, to give it value, you would want hammerings dished out to show the dangers of a lesser side getting it wrong. You would not want every game to finish 1-1. A close finish is not enough but you would still want it to be tight it the top. You would not want a procession: you would still want every game to carry a sense of jeopardy. You would want a balance between tightness and differentiation.

There is a danger, always, of becoming wrapped up in the league you tend to cover but it surely is not cheerleading to point out that, a quarter of the way into the Premier League season, the ideal is effectively what we have got. The top five are separated by a single point and all of them have a goal difference of between +9 and +11.

This is shaping up to be the season we dreamed of when a majority of the world’s best and most charismatic managers descended on the Premier League. Last season brought a fourth different champion in four years, something that has not happened since 1993.

Liverpool, having played four games against other members of a putative Big Six, three away from home, can perhaps draw encouragement from the fact that their fixture list has been the toughest so far. Tottenham and Arsenal can be considered to have had the easiest starts, having both played only two games against other members of the Big Six – and at home. Manchester City, perhaps, will be troubled by the fact that, after that remarkable start of 10 wins in a row in all competitions, including the league victory against Manchester United, they now have not won in six.

However, none of the top sides are crushingly brilliant – yet. City have shown flashes and perhaps remain the most likely champions but the recent run of poor form has raised suspicions that Pep Guardiola has perhaps tried to change too much too soon. Liverpool can be thrilling but can struggle to break down deep-lying opponents and are vulnerable to set plays.

Tottenham look robust but are not quite as fluid as they might be and are struggling for goals. Chelsea are feeling their way into a new tactical system that does not necessarily fit their squad. Arsenal are Arsenal, forever capering on the brink of a crisis of confidence. And Manchester United, six points off the top and in seventh, are oddly subdued and stodgy. The EFL Cup victory against City brought relief but it does not mean a solution has been found.

For the neutral, however, those vulnerabilities add to the intrigue. There are few things more tedious than a hero without flaws. But perhaps that is a subjective view. In Why England Lose, Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski point out that viewing figures for golf soared when Tiger Woods was at his peak, that people wanted to see an all-time great being great. A similar motivation probably drives at least some of the tourists who flock to the Camp Nou or Old Trafford, or who have bought their cable subscriptions specifically to watch Real Madrid or Bayern Munich. They want to see Lionel Messi being Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo being Cristiano Ronaldo, performing their tricks and their flicks as their side put on an exhibition: there is a Harlem Globetrotters aspect to modern fandom.

Football is not golf, though. The real joy of watching Woods at his peak was not so much seeing him beat the field by 10 shots, it was seeing him exercise mastery over the course. There is joy in seeing a great player or a great team playing football to an extraordinary level but without an opponent it lacks context. We can admire the skills of a freestyler but they are barely even a sideshow to the sport itself.

Sufficient quality

This, perhaps, is the paradox of those sports in which the competitors face each other directly, where the challenge is not who makes the best score or completes the course the quickest but in beating an opponent. There needs to be sufficient quality for the sport to be attractive but if there is too much, or rather if the distribution of that quality is too imbalanced, the competitive element is lost. Part of the appeal of football is the drama – and that requires weakness as well as strength.

Clubs, of course, will try to eliminate those vulnerabilities but their presence, perhaps, is part of the attraction. Guardian Service