Charles Dickens opened the Tale of Two Cities, with the immortal line “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”. I cannot help that for a football fan, and premiership fan in particular this seems particularly apt. The off season ironically always seems busier than the regular season. The lack of actual football to watch mean the rumour mill goes crazy, fans speculate using the flimsiest pieces of evidence, movers move, shakers shake, whereas once the actual Season starts all you do is watch football. This off season has been even more eventful than most.
We has Sepp Blatter get elected, then resign and then somehow remain in charge, World Cup hosting rights come under questions, bribery scandals, and also the rather more mundane activity of continental tournaments, pre season friendlies and players moving clubs. One can’t help but feel that off season has become the equivalent of a 3 month draft week for the Premiership. But obviously a million times more intense because football fandom is the most intense fandom in existence.
Yet despite (or because of?) this intensity I am finding myself more burnt out here at the beginning of the new season that at the start of the last one. I am not sure why this is, when I first started watching football I was not that clued up about the off season. Before the Premiership era I would catch an hour long highlights show every Sunday afternoon. Manchester United were not that great a team then so they wouldn’t be the featured game very often. I would occasionally read a newspaper article. I am ashamed to say I totally forgot about football in the off season (barring World Cup or Euro years), only occasionally catching something if there was a big transfer.
These transfers of course happened more often in the off season but back then we didn’t have a transfer window, so players could in theory of course leave any time. The other reason why transfers were so uncommon was because there was no Bosman rule, making it harder for players to change their place of employment. But this i think was only part of the picture.
The footballing landscape was changed forever when a certain Russian decided to invest in a certain debt ridden club in London. This change was already started with the huge amounts of money being paid to clubs with TV rights, sponsor deals etc, but Roman Abramovich was the catalyst which sped this equation. Now not only could players change clubs more easily, there was also ridiculous sums of money available to finance these transfers.
This culminated to the current day where I was so distracted by the (admittedly more intense) off season I nearly forgot about the Community Shield. A mere $50 raise in price was making me wonder if I would re-subscribe to my Premiership pass, as I wasn’t sure how many games I would end up watching. This is something I can’t ever imagine I would ever contemplate. I know I’ll always be a football fan, but perhaps the the spin off has now become more enjoyable to me than the main series.
NineSixFourTwo 