“The game’s gone,” many a drunken old man has declared to the rest of the pub, protesting that the beautiful game was a much purer sport before the increasingly sanitised corporate era, back when pre-pass-back-rule-football played on farcical pitches was so boring rival fans turned to amusing themselves by beating the Christian Fuchs out of each other across the country on any given Saturday.
Many a drunken old man have been waved off by younger predecessors who will inevitably make the same claims several years and countless boozy nights down the line, when they suffer the same aged curse of mistaking a failure to keep pace with the modern world as the modern world soullessly leaving them behind.
Old men always think the world has become a worse place; that the next generation are softer and stupider than his yet somehow given an easier ride through life.
Yet, amid a summer in which the Premier League will almost certainly spend in excess of £1.5billion on players and in which one club has spent £126million on full-backs alone – Manchester City – you have to wonder whether those many old men had a point, whether football can continue in this way and whether, eventually, the bubble that is the relentless rise of the Premier League will burst. Maybe the game has gone already; maybe we’re now in the post-game era filled with post-truths and fake news.
Of course, there are justifiable reasons for City to spend £126million on full-backs this summer. Over the last few years, it has become one of the most important positions on the pitch, providing the dynamism once expected of central midfielders and the delivery once expected of wingers, but City finished last season with easily the worst full-back options in the top seven, all three beyond their 30th birthdays and their title-contending expiration.
There’s no way Pep Guardiola could have gone into next season depending on Pablo Zabaleta, Bacary Sagna and Gael Clichy, who were all released at the end of 2016/17, and full-backs these days cost almost as much as attacking midfielders. In fact, no position has seen a greater inflation in average price amongst the Premier League’s top six clubs since summer 2013.
Yet, whether the three full-backs in question are actually worth that almighty sum remains a subject open to debate – particularly in regards to £50million signing Kyle Walker, who hasn’t even held down the No.2 berth in the England team since making his debut in 2011. Tottenham were more than glad to see the back of the 27-year-old and there’s an incredible irony in them effectively replacing him with Kieran Trippier, a right-back who began his career at Manchester City but was deemed surplus to requirements in 2012 and accordingly sold to Burnley back in their mid-table Championship days.
Along with Clyne, Trippier will be Walker’s biggest competitor for England’s right-back slot next season and one of his biggest competitors for a spot in the PFA Team of the Year. While he cost Spurs a mere £3.5million, however, City have just spent £50million on a player their one-time academy product forced out of the starting XI at the end of last season, that Tottenham seemingly think is a better option on the right side of defence anyway. In fact, he’d probably be a better fit for City as well, possessing superior technical quality to his former team-mate.
Of course, Trippier probably wouldn’t have developed into the footballer he is today if he’d stayed at City, especially during a time in which the Sheik owners were spending the club’s way to its first ever Premier League title. Playing over 270 games before his 27th birthday and featuring in two promotion-winning sides under Sean Dyche has clearly aided his development.
But in many ways, that’s precisely the point; when the demand for success has become so short-term clubs are paying £50million to address a problem that could have been solved by simply keeping faith in an academy player for a few more years, there is clearly a vast intrinsic flaw within the English game.
Trippier isn’t the only recent example of a club wasting a small fortune through a failure to develop young players either; last summer, Manchester United paid a world-record transfer fee to re-sign Paul Pogba, a youth player who’d left Old Trafford for free four years earlier due to a lack of game-time.
Earlier this summer, Chelsea were prepared to pay £75million before the Red Devils beat them to Romelu Lukaku – more than double the sum they let Everton acquire his services for only three years ago. Likewise, although he ended up at Everton, former academy product Michael Keane could have easily been United’s centre-back signing this summer instead of Victor Lindelof after another impressive season at Burnley.
That’s not to say no Premier League club re-purchased former youngsters who’d proved themselves elsewhere until a few years ago, Martin Keown returning to Arsenal after successful spells with Aston Villa and Everton particularly coming to mind. But what makes the modern day examples so staggering is the sheer level of money involved. The Gunners bought back Keown for £2million; re-signing Pogba last summer cost 45 times as much.
Perhaps there’s quite simply so much money in the Premier League now that clubs can afford to let talented youngsters leave, knowing that they have the finance to buy them back if they come good. But that mentality falls somewhere between laziness and almost arrogant decadence, precisely defying what academies were created to do; produce future first team stars. Trippier, Pogba, Lukaku and Keane tell us the academies are holding up their end of the bargain still – the clubs and managers are simply ignoring the potential of the young players at their disposal, or at the very least lacking the patience to wait for it to blossom.
The Premier League may be the most lucrative and commercially successful top flight in world football, but every empire eventually crumbles, usually when it becomes parody of itself. That’s exactly what’s happening to the Premier League; no manager has the freedom to look beyond the next season and every club tries to solve every problem by simply throwing more money at it to the point where they’re paying for what they already once had.
The Premier League will eventually be destroyed by its own short-termist thinking and lust for spending. If the game isn’t gone already, it’s definitely going – then again, maybe I’m just getting old.
