"CHEER UP Kevin Keegan
What can it mean
To a sad Geordie realist
And a trapped football team".
Eternal optimist Kevin Keegan has spoken a great truth: that the Big Four have the Premier League stitched up like a kipper and that even with sustained spending "the eighth biggest club in the world" are still light years away from catching them. How does he think we feel?
Keegan is emotional honest and I like him for that. Such openness may well be a chink in his psychological armour and a trait that is widely ridiculed - "I'd love it" etc - but it is a shaft of light in a murky world and should be encouraged. That honesty has now helped illuminated the dark reality of the Premiership: it is a pay-to-play game rigged in favour of the elite Champions League quadropoly and the rest have no chance in a boring league with no competitive balance.
Speaking after Newcastle were brushed aside 2-0 by Chelsea at St James' Park the now world weary supremo cut right through the spin that surrounds the greatest league in the world with a clinical analysis of the political and economic paralysis that has made it a moribund set-up devoid of drama, competition or the possibility of change.
He described the effects of a decade of sustained spending that has created a 'Premier League within the Premier League' made the Big Four untouchable and, more depressingly, the glass ceiling that prevents even a club with Newcastle considerable financial muscle having any realistic ambitions of ever breaking the shackles they now find themselves in. Fifth is the best even the most ambitious challengers can dream of.
I could have written that any time over the past decade (and I have, many times, believe me) - but I am a dangerous radical, a doom-monger, a sentimental nostalgist looking backwards to a mythical golden age, a Luddite, a powerless samizdat propagandist swamped by super soaraway sizzling small screen satellite soccer, a naive idealist on a fruitless quest to restore the quaint Corinthian notion of equality of opportunity that underpins any sporting endeavour. When I say it, it is just webzine whinging.
But when a current manager, and the manager of a club with genuine financial muscle and aspirations to make the ever more elusive breakthrough, says it then it is dynamite. Keegan's statements, and they were deeply considered, articulate and compelling arguments and not just an emotive discharge, is an important break from the dug-out protocol that promotes the collective lie that the Premier League's lifeblood - TV cash - is good for the game. It isn't.
He has outlined the bleak reality that most 'small' club supporters long ago recognised. That a normally upbeat manager from one of the league's most overtly ambitious second tier sides has gone public on his personal frustration at banging his head against the fortifications of cash is a sign of the growing discontent at the distortion of a once great game.
The money has killed the game as a spectacle. It has concentrated the key resources, players, support and political and economic power in the hands of ever fewer hands. It has created a Big Four juggernaut that is far too intimately entwined with the broadcasters, which has neutered the power of the Football Association and which has crushed any notion that the game is for the mug punters who pay to watch it in stadiums. It has created a cynical industry geared entirely to opening new revenue streams and in which the big brands are cemented at the top.
Keegan is right. The Premier League IS boring. We knew in August which four teams would hog the Champions League trough. We knew which team was definitely going down and we knew broadly which five or six others would be battling to avoid joining them. The rest of the season is just jockeying for position in the unseemly squabble over the crumbs from the top table.
Unless there is a political revolt against this institutional imbalance the game as we know it - a competition between two broadly matched teams in a contest where the dramatic tension comes from the fact that the outcome is unpredictable - will be dead.
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