Man City hope to kill EPL with cash: Neil Humphreys
Forget any hopes of a more equitable season
Remember those heady days of optimism and the faint promise of a closer, fairer English Premier League competition?
Yeah, they're gone.
Some time after the Italians lifted the Euro 2020 trophy but before Sunday morning's (Singapore time) Community Shield at Wembley, the familiar version of English football snuck in through the back door.
| LEICESTER CITY | MANCHESTER CITY |
While Tokyo 2020 captured our attention, Manchester City tried to buy two players for more than £100 million (S$187.8m) each.
Jack Grealish may well have signed by the time you read this. Harry Kane is still playing a game of brinkmanship with his irascible chairman at Tottenham Hotspur.
But Daniel Levy has as much chance of keeping his striker as Aston Villa have of using hometown loyalty to hang on to Grealish.
Both are off to the Etihad, maybe by the end of the week, or the end of the month, but Kane and Grealish are destined to join the champions. The tractor beam of guaranteed trophies is impossible to resist.
When Pep Guardiola swaggers into the Wembley sunshine, leading his dynasty out for the curtain-raiser against Leicester City, he could be forgiven a wry grin.
He doesn't need Kane or Grealish. But he wants them. So he gets them.
This is the unnatural order of things making a swift return to an imbalanced competition that spent the final months of last season teasing us with the prospect of something better.
The European Super League fiasco was supposed to be the tipping point; the last straw for those disillusioned with the rich-obscenely rich divide.
When six English clubs conspired with Europe's elite to form their risk-free private members' club, with no relegation and no chance of a dip in revenue, the industry recoiled. A line had been crossed.
STRONG REACTIONS
Everyone from Gary Neville to Gary Lineker savaged the unscrupulous behaviour and demanded petitions, commissions, revolutions and wealth redistribution.
Money was definitely ruining football then.
It doesn’t seem to be such a pressing concern now.
In the coming days, Manchester City could break the British transfer record twice, the same club involved in a Financial Fair Play investigation and one of the co-conspirators behind the European Super League.
The hypocrisy is dazzling. The same TV pundits and radio hosts bewailing the death of modern football four months ago are now trumpeting City’s transfer plans like over-eager auctioneers working on commission.
So the new season looks a lot like the very old ones, the ones that predated the pandemic and any whimsical notions of a level playing field.
The result of the Community Shield will be inconsequential, as it always is, but even more so this time around. City’s subsequent performances in the transfer market will have a far greater bearing.
Guardiola’s men finished 12 points clear of their nearest rivals last season, without Kane, without Grealish and without a recognised striker in many games. It didn’t matter.
Just as it doesn’t matter if Phil Foden, Raheem Sterling, John Stones, Ederson and Kyle Walker miss the Community Shield as they recover from Euro 2020 and the Copa America.
Leicester may give a Wembley bow to new signing Patson Daka, the £23m striker from Red Bull Salzburg, but his appearance won’t really matter either.
What happens in the coming days, in the boardrooms of City, Villa and Tottenham, will shape the EPL’s conscience for the foreseeable future.
Other clubs have invested heavily, namely Manchester United, but there’s something about the staggering gall of City’s spending ambition, as if the rancour of the previous six months has dissipated.
Staff furloughs, sacked mascots and greedy breakaways are quietly being filed away. It’s as you were. Inequality reigns.
With City missing several key players and Leicester at almost full strength, the Foxes might spring a surprise at Wembley on Sunday.
Savour the upset. There won’t be many more when the season kicks off.
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