EPL TALK: Weary season got the anti-climactic end it deserved

MANCHESTER City lost, but it didn’t matter. Leicester City won, but it didn’t matter. The Cinderellas turned into pumpkins and obscene wealth prevailed. The fairy tale is dead. Long live the petro-kings.

A long, weary English Premier League season got the anti-climactic end it deserved. A final-day relegation battle between Everton, Leicester City and Leeds United offered broadcasters a chance to rouse interest, like an over-eager party host promising to play one more song as guests headed for the door, but it was all too little too late.

Apart from the Toffees, everyone else trudged along to a predictable denouement.

This never-ending season felt like a white-flag surrender to geopolitical power and non-sporting ideals. A protracted campaign was clumsily sliced in two with all the grace of a bad magician standing over his boxed assistant, thanks to a winter World Cup that no one wanted.

But Qatar got what it wanted, sealing its soft-power exercise with a kiss and a hug from Lionel Messi in ceremonial robes. Abu Dhabi got what it wanted with a fifth league title in six years at the Etihad. And Saudi Arabia got what it wanted with Champions League football at Newcastle United, ahead of schedule, too. But such folks generally get what they want, ahead of schedule.

And the rest of us? Who cares? You think this season was about the naïve fools flocking through the turnstiles or flopping onto sofas to watch a rigged game, one pretty much settled before a ball was kicked? This season was the end of something, or the beginning of something, depending on your levels of optimism or club of choice. City were runaway favourites from the moment they signed the Nordic lab experiment.

Erling Haaland offered us a dystopian glimpse of what lies in store, a futuristic creation of athletic perfection, difficult to stop, hard to replicate and impossible to buy for all but a couple of clubs. Pep Guardiola’s mob were close to flawless before Ivan Drago’s lovechild turned up promising to break everyone. With him, City are starting to look sheepish, as if they can’t quite believe they’re able to do this so easily.

Arsenal needed the sustained campaign of their lives to get within five points after hammering Wolves 5-0 on the final day. Even then, Mikel Arteta must still speak of a “journey”, like a forlorn middle manager of an SME promising to remain relevant among MNCs. It has to be about the journey because the endgame remains inevitable. Obvious.

So we kid ourselves, like children at Christmas pretending that a pair of socks is the ultimate gift, looking for blue skies on cloudy days. Manchester United returned to the Champions League! Liverpool squeaked into the Europa League! David de Gea won the Golden Glove!

Indeed, the image of smiling Red Devils crowding around their goalkeeper as if waiting for him to lift the Champions League trophy might be the most on-the-nose visual metaphor of a season when standards didn’t just dip, they were rewritten.

Disingenuous to talk about league diversity and equality

In their post-match punditry, Jamie Carragher and Micah Richards praised the league’s diversity, noting the rise of Newcastle and Aston Villa but sounding like a Seventies’ boss trumpeting his company’s diversity because there’s two women in the typing pool.

Aston Villa, Brentford and Brighton were bright spots on a cluttered horizon – the Magpies were always going to soar on the wings of petrodollars – but it’s becoming increasingly disingenuous to focus on a league’s equality, when the reigning champions are facing 115 charges for alleged financial cheating (having already been found guilty in the past.)

A long season of caveats and asterisks was also one of carelessness and apathy, as the EPL (and international football) continued to sleepwalk through one awkward and uncomfortable obstacle after another, both big and small. The World Cup is going to Qatar after a corrupt bidding process? Oh, it’ll be addressed and fixed. City are facing even more allegations of financial doping? Oh, it’ll be addressed and fixed.

The apathy didn't stop there either.

Chelsea’s new owners are spending erratically. Tottenham’s older owners are not spending enough. Liverpool’s ageing midfield can no longer press with the same tenacity. Arsenal lack strength in depth. Manchester United need a proper striker. Everton are short on firepower. The Foxes are flirting with relegation. Leeds can’t defend. Not to worry. It’ll all be addressed and fixed.

But none of it was. Instead, there was just an overriding sense of getting this season out of the way, dealing with the unwanted World Cup gate-crashers, cleaning up the mess afterwards and writing off a carnival of excess that no one wanted to attend.

And after the hangover came the realisation. The horror. The price that might need to be paid for the distractions and the underlying complacency. Club owners woke up and smelled the relegation threat. They panicked. Leeds and Leicester sacked their managers and went down. Bournemouth, Nottingham Forest and West Ham stuck with their men in a muddle and beat the drop.

It’s not a clean picture. Everton and Crystal Palace switched up and stayed up, but those last-minute spins on the managerial merry-go-round underlined the zombie-like environment. For too long, too many clubs drifted, staggering along with little direction or purpose, before overreacting in the hope of a late course correction.

If ever a season encapsulated a trip to the dentist, then this was it. Everyone involved just wanted to get it out of the way as soon as possible, to give us a chance to consume something sweeter next time around.

Will that happen though? The crown doesn’t seem particularly heavy on Pep Guardiola’s head. And he’s not going anywhere. Nor is the geopolitical Game of Thrones that paid for his passion project, bought a World Cup, sliced the EPL season in two and may yet end with the Treble. The politics and the petrodollars are here to stay.

In a fitting epilogue to the EPL season, Haaland collected his Golden Boot award. He didn’t need to feature in the final game to finish six goals clear on 36. It was that easy. At Leicester, Jamie Vardy enjoyed the applause from the crowd, a kind tribute for being the last man standing from that 2016 title triumph.

Vardy is now dropping into the Championship. Haaland is now part of football’s autocracy. It's a fair outcome, but the end of every schoolboy fantasy. Winners will no longer come from Vardy's universe. Our universe. That particular dream is over.

Neil Humphreys is an award-winning football writer and a best-selling author, who has covered the English Premier League since 2000 and has written 26 books.

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