“Football makes people mad,” Sepp Blatter once said, and that never seems truer than when the football doesn’t mean that much. Welcome to the Premier League’s post-table period, where everything seems to have been turned on its head and you wouldn't necessarily guess where teams are from their feelings.
There are some parallels with the post-truth era in politics in terms of perceptions, albeit with the significant caveat that very little of it actually matters.
That is the entire point. There is so little to play for, and yet that very vacuum has seemed to make so many people around football more histrionically animated than if everything was going to the wire. The latter might at least have provided some focus. The last weekend’s matches were a vintage set of post-table fixtures: on the beach but in the wars. There was so much that didn’t seem to make sense.
Most conspicuously, there are Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur, directly above the relegation zone in 16th and 17th, respectively. That’s despite their positions on the Deloitte Football Money League as the fourth and ninth wealthiest clubs in the world, as they stand on the brink of a Champions League return through Europa League final glory.
One of Ruben Amorim or Ange Postecoglou could lift a historic trophy, but there they were openly discussing their own futures in such an agitated manner.
Most visibly, there was a white t-shirted Evangelos Marinakis publicly berating the manager who has taken his Nottingham Forest from 17th to seventh.
This was despite the shipping magnate temporarily placing Forest in a “blind trust”, due to his simultaneous ownership of both Olympiakos and Rio Ave and Uefa’s rules on that, as a consequence of the Nottingham club’s celebrated return to European football.
Documents at Companies House show Marinakis has ceased to be a "person with significant control" at the club. He didn't display too much control of emotion after the 2-2 draw with Leicester City, anyway.
Most emotionally, you wouldn’t have thought Liverpool were celebrating a Premier League title, given the conflicted atmosphere that developed once parts of the club started booing Trent Alexander-Arnold. Two weeks of jubilation instead evolved into what looked like an angry club culture war.
Even after that 2-2 draw, Mikel Arteta chose a spirited Arsenal comeback as the moment to berate his players for performance. That was only surprising in the context of the last two weeks, and comments he has made in opposite situations that have raised eyebrows.
And that is one thing that should be stressed with all of these contrasts. There are complicated contexts, that shouldn’t be overlooked.
Take the Liverpool case first, since that is what even Jamie Carragher said would now dominate headlines. It has.
The line that has developed throughout this controversy is that no one should tell the club’s supporters how to feel, and that’s perfectly fair. There are highly intimate local elements to this that only does close to it would truly understand.
Except, you now have Liverpool’s own match-going fans telling each other how to feel. Some who attended Anfield on Sunday have talked about arguments between supporters and a divisive atmosphere. One radio show featured a local in tears about the response.
It should similarly be stressed that there’s a significant difference between telling fans how to feel and outsiders understandably commenting on that reaction. It’s a big story, at one of the biggest clubs in the world.
These are the champions, a status that supporters have waited 35 years to properly celebrate. That memory will now, at least in part, involve this internal debate. What feels remarkable from the outside - and it should very much be emphasised this is the outside - is how a title celebration has led to this.
Except, we all know this wouldn’t have happened if the title was actually on the line. This is a direct product of the vacuum, but also the media-industrial complex around football. There’s not much to really move people on the pitch, but the business can’t stop. The afterglow of a title that would normally remain so warming can’t last that long when the furnace demands more. Even Alexander-Arnold’s announcement had to become “an event”. To think that there was a moment when he seemed to want to deride the noise around his future by putting his hand to his ear. He’s heard it now.
So has Nuno Espirito, albeit directly in his face. Forest do still have something to play for given that they're going for the Champions League but, in normal circumstances, this would be a bonus ambition amid a great season.
Sure, it’s disappointing that they might miss out on qualification having in January been considered as potential title challengers. Any rational analysis would conclude the team has massively overachieved, and that’s even in the context of Forest’s wage bill shooting up after a points deduction for a breach of financial rules last season.
And yet there was Marinakis, publicly berating his manager in scenes that are unprecedented even in the Premier League.
This is what football has become.
Even the absurdity of the Spurs and United seasons comes from the business of the game, and how financial incentives have ensured a Uefa rule where the Europa League also brings Champions League qualification. A trophy on its own apparently isn’t enough any more, so both clubs have essentially played as if their top-seven wage bills aren’t enough to fully compete on two fronts.
An increasingly resonant line, relayed in this writer’s book ‘States of Play’, was what a senior NFL figure told the Premier League’s founding executives when they were on a fact-finding missions.
“If you think you’ve got problems now, wait until you have money.”
Now, a season can’t just play out. The machine around it all has generated more chaos than we would have anticipated. Even the most measured business people are driven to irrationality in football. Look at some of the decisions that both Sir Jim Ratcliffe and Daniel Levy have made.
And yet that is also where two sides of this meet.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the Alexander-Arnold story has been mild criticism for Arne Slot for bringing the right-back on, and contributing to the conflicted atmosphere. This is essentially asking an ultra-professional title-winning manager not play one of his best players when he’s trying to win a match against next season’s likely title rivals, because of the need to emotionally manage the crowd.
Except, of course a fan obviously isn’t going to think like a modern-day player. If they did, the professionals wouldn’t earn anywhere near as much as they do, and some of these controversies wouldn’t even arise.
It is precisely these pure emotions that the business of the sport successfully seeks to capitalise; “the commodification of feelings” as sports lawyer and former Everton player Gareth Farrelly put it.
As befits the weekend, there is curiously some good and bad to this. Or, maybe more relevantly, there are occasionally moments when good seems bad and bad seems good.
Emotion and fan irrationality are what drives sport. Capitalising all of that are what erodes it. This is never clearer than in this post-table period, and trying to make sense of a bizarre weekend.
