English football is not boring

Nil-nil. I stared blankly at the screen. I had just spent 90 minutes watching Arsenal and FC Sporting hobble to a goalless draw in the UEFA Champions League quarter final. 

The match was on in my local. A friend (an admirer of Blackburn Rovers, and therefore having no purchase in the domain of what makes football exciting) was quick to point out that the other quarter-final, Bayern Munich versus Real Madrid, might have been the wiser choice. Arsenal’s failure to score was in his view, and the views of an increasing number online, yet another example of the Premier League had become “boring”. 

Bayern versus Real was undoubtedly the better match. The Galacticos, Real Madrid, the most successful club side in Europe graced with talents like Kylian Mbappe and Vinicius Junior, versus Bayern, the Bavarian giants who love nothing more than to flex their muscles on football’s biggest stage. Both clubs’ crests deserve to be carved into football’s Mount Rushmore. 

To compare the Premier League to a single, high-octane European tie is folly. Yet there is a growing narrative that one of Britain’s top exports has indeed become boring. 

There is, perhaps, something characteristically British in all this. We have a habit of diminishing our own successes, of assuming that what is popular must also be declining. The Premier League, for all its commercial might, has not escaped this instinct.

This is a curious claim. If the Premier League is dull, it is doing an extraordinary job of disguising it. It boasts an average of 2.74 goals per game — only the German Bundesliga has a higher average. Attendances are also vastly higher than our European rivals with an average attendance of roughly 40,000 per match (Spain and Italy are closer to 30,000).

The Premier League commands a global audience that makes others pale into insignificance; more people watched the last Liverpool vs Manchester City match than the Super Bowl. An estimated 1.87 billion people tune in worldwide. Maybe, then, the complaint is not really about entertainment. 

For what critics often miss is that the Premier League is not less dramatic than its rivals, as recent games have shown — rather it is less forgiving. If I had a penny each time I heard someone say, “There are no easy games in the Premier League”, I would be on more money than most of the players out on the pitch. 

But there is truth to this somewhat cliche remark. Premier League clubs do not have space to conserve energy for grander occasions — like Champions League quarter finals. From top to bottom, the league is saturated with wealth, data analytics and physical intensity. The result is a competition in which margins are finer and games more tiring on the bodies of the players.

Look no further than this season. 

One of the tightest title races in years has unfolded at the summit, while the reigning Premier League title holders, Liverpool, have found themselves scrapping merely to secure Champions League qualification despite spending £446 million on new players last summer. Elsewhere, one of the Premier League’s vaunted “big six”, Tottenham Hotspur, armed with all the financial and institutional advantages that status confers, has spent much of the campaign glancing nervously over its shoulder at the relegation zone and could well still go down. 

By contrast, Europe can flatter to deceive. 

The Champions League, for all its drama, is a sequence of isolated events: knockout ties designed to produce spectacle. Domestic leagues such as La Liga or Serie A still contain structural imbalances that allow their elite clubs to cruise through large portions of the season relatively untested.

As Bale noted in a recent interview on The Overlap, clubs like Real Madrid can afford the luxury of easing off domestically, safe in the knowledge that there are fixtures they are expected to win at a canter. 

English clubs enjoy no such privilege. 

The consequence is predictable: Spanish sides often arrive in Europe fresher, more composed and better able to deliver the kind of high-scoring drama that fuels highlight reels. English sides arrive at their physical limit.

What, then, is being mistaken for the mundane is, in truth, the consequences of rigorous weekly competition. The Premier League does not always offer the majesty of a Bayern Munich versus Real Madrid tie. Instead it offers a relentless contest in which any lapse is punished, any weakness exposed and any ego swiftly humbled.

Even last year’s dip in television viewership, reported at around 10 per cent, tells us less than it once might have. In an era of fragmented media consumption and illegal streaming, such figures are an imperfect measure of engagement. The crowds, at least, continue to turn up. 

Beneath the criticism lies something universal: nostalgia. 

If you are bored of the Premier League, you may simply be bored of football itself

A yearning for a Premier League before VAR (Video Assistant Referees), before Manchester City’s dominance (and the 115 alleged financial breaches associated with it), before the sport’s full commercial transformation. But football has always invited this kind of longing. 

Each generation insists the game was better ten years ago. It is a pattern as old as civilisation itself: complaints about decline can be found etched into the records of ancient Egypt, lamenting the supposed failings of the young. Football is not immune from this phenomenon.

But the truth is simpler. The Premier League has not become boring. It has become more competitive, week in, week out.

To complain that it lacks excitement is, in the end, rather like Samuel Johnson’s famous observation, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.

If you are bored of the Premier League, you may simply be bored of football itself.