Leeds United 3 Liverpool 3 a sign of a weak Premier League? Behave… | OneFootball

I’ve seen a lot of people saying that such poor sides as Liverpool or Manchester United sitting within touching distance of the top six shows the poor quality of the league this season. And also that Arsenal are top by winning games from set-pieces and that Manchester City are over-reliant on Erling Haaland. I honestly don’t know what such precious people want. Have you bought the ‘elite’ rubbish the league has been selling for decades?

It perfectly illustrates how a certain mindset has been inculcated into some fans when the league tries to make a virtue out of tedious predictability. What do you want – competition or dominance? Surely competition wins every time? Money bringing success has become the default; don’t you find that depressing? Can’t you enjoy the smallest temporary cracks in its hegemony?

I’d love to see Villa win the league (they probably won’t) but let’s not pretend the current travails of some big clubs represent a change in the overall direction of travel. The richest clubs will assert their dominance sooner or later. I think some people actively dislike unpredictability. It’s like people who buy fast food because it’s always the same and predictably so. Homogeneity reduces everything to a facility or product without the dirty unpredictability of humanity.

Leeds United’s 3-3 against Liverpool wasn’t an example of the weak league; it was just really enjoyable football.

If you can’t enjoy that without making some overarching judgement about this mythical concept of ‘quality’, I pity you. Living life as a series of judgements on where everything is placed on a notional quality league table sounds very anal.

That draw – was it quality? Why bother judging? It was just fun. It’s not an essay writing competition. You can resort to clinical facts, of course, as if we enjoy football for the logic and statistical conclusions rather than emotion. But surely the important thing, regardless of this supposed quality, is whether it’s actually enjoyable. I take enjoyment above any skill level you want to reference. Poetry stimulates your synapses in a way maths doesn’t.

If a defender kicks it in off someone’s backside, that’s clearly more fun than a technically perfect 0-0 draw.

Don’t worry, the same teams will be back hogging a lot of the talent and dominating soon enough. There hasn’t been a revolution. It’s more than likely that City, Arsenal or Chelsea will win the league; let us just enjoy a brief moment where sometimes we don’t know the result of a game before kick-off.

Why do these people insist on the Freudian practice of trying to measure everything and everyone to arrive at a ‘satisfaction’ quotient? Is it a result of computer football where everything is presented as predictably good, average or poor, with a corresponding price? That’s not reality.

The irony is, more typically, the Premier League is less regularly entertaining and more predictable than the other four major European leagues and certainly less entertaining than the Scottish Championship so enjoy this, almost certainly brief, period where results are unpredictable. Because history suggests it won’t last long.

Stop mithering that a side isn’t good enough in your vague, imprecise assessment of ‘quality’ to be top six. If many of the sides are all bunched together and keep flying up the table and dropping back down, that’s a good thing. Yes it’s unusual and a break from what has become the norm, but the opposite of a sign of this league being poor. It makes it more compelling. Better.

The companies, organisations and states who own top-flight football crave predictability and want to invest in a safe bet and use huge amounts of money to ensure it. The last thing they want is teams going up and down the league as it might harm their income stream. Don’t be like them. Their influence is already pernicious enough. Celebrate unpredictability because it won’t last long.