In contrast, this year’s Premier League finale was a bit of a disappointment. I watched ESPN’s coverage – for the last time, apparently, since NBC has seized ESPN’s US rights package. Ian Darke tried his best to make the Arsenal-Newcastle match interesting, but to no avail: despite Darke’s natural bubbliness, his friendly banter with Steve McManaman and McManaman’s comic attempts to reconcile the laws of the English language with whatever it is that goes on inside his head, Newcastle refused to create chances and Arsenal won 1-0. At one point, the commentary team promised an Update From White Hart Lane, which usually means a Goal From White Hart Lane. Alas, the subsequent split screen yielded only a goalmouth scramble. When Darke interrupted the increasingly tedious Arsenal match to announce that Andres Villas-Boas had substituted (AMERICAN SUPERSTAR) Clint Dempsey, I was ready to call it a season.

Manchester United won the title in April, Wigan was relegated last Wednesday, and the race for fourth gradually lost steam. Ten years from now, we’ll remember this season not because it has featured exciting football from the most exciting league in the world, but because it’s beginning to resemble some sort of grand turning point. Because Paul Scholes, Jamie Carragher, David Beckham, Michael Owen and, of course, Sir Alex Ferguson are retiring. Because Jose Mourinho is about to return to Chelsea. Because, in March, the London Times falsely reported that a cohort of Qatari businessmen was organizing a revolutionary European “dream league.” Because although The Times later admitted that renowned football journalist Oliver Kay had been thoroughly duped, terms like “dream league” and “European super league” are now as much a part of the football lexicon as Peter Drury’s tired old clichés

I honestly don’t know whether these things are good or bad. Maybe our Beckham-less, Ferguson-free football world would benefit from a Middle Eastern shakeup. Or maybe those two retirements are the harbingers of a footballing apocalypse. Cue the shots of Arab billionaires sorting through the rubble of what was once Old Trafford.

The summer transfer window opened yesterday.

Anyway, here’s what you can expect from INFTH over the next couple of weeks:

• A piece about FOX Sports commentator Gus Johnson
• The last installment in my fantasy football series
• General musings on the end of the season

I’m going to leave you with a quotation from Pride and Prejudice, which Austen started writing during half-time of a Southampton match. In honor of Mark van Bommel:

“Angry people are not always wise.”

This is one reason so few football fans are discussing the Great Big Secret of 2012-13: for the first time in a long time, none of the five major European leagues has produced a genuinely exciting title run-in[2].

Earlier this month, Bayern Munich clinched the 2013 Bundesliga. In Spain, Barcelona is only a few games away from yet another trophy. Manchester United is strolling to title #20, and Juventus has surged clear at the summit of Serie A. In Ligue 1, nouveau riche Paris St. Germain is seven points ahead of its closest challenger.

At the moment, football revolves almost entirely around elite teams that buy the best players, win the most important trophies, and snatch the biggest slices of the TV pie. Later this year, UEFA plans to implement the Financial Fair Play program, which Michel Platini claims will level the playing field. It’s unclear, however, whether the program will actually work the way Platini intends. Some experts fear that FFP, which is designed to ward off Portsmouth-type financial Armageddon by preventing smaller teams from taking economic risks, will only strengthen the top clubs’ stranglehold. A year from now, the Manchester City model – under which a rich owner spends and spends until his team qualifies for Europe or wins the league championship – will no longer be a viable option for scrappy aspirants.

This is good news for Sir Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United, which is going to win the Premier League title despite its dodgy midfield and geriatric center backs. Last season, United lost the league championship on arguably the most exciting day in Premier League history[3]; this year, all anyone wants to talk about is PSG’s alleged interest in Wayne Rooney.

United will compete for the Premier League title every year – at least, until Sir Alex finally calls it a day, which won’t be anytime soon. Juventus, Bayern and Barcelona are all perennial trophy-winners. PSG has a lot of money, a brilliant coach and Zlatan Ibrahimovich. It’s no surprise that these teams are winning big-time competitions: we know there’s no equality in football. In each country, the same three or four clubs vie for major honors. But this is entertaining only when that three- or four-team mini-league is intensely competitive — when, for instance, the Manchester derby actually means something and the Classico isn’t just a Champions League warm-up match.

In theory, next season should be as exciting as ever. United is the best team in it league only because that league is mediocre; once City gets its act together, Chelsea settles on a manager (Mourinho? Moyes?), and Andres Villas-Boas harnesses the not inconsiderable power of Emmanuel Adebayor, the Premier League title race will come alive. Barcelona may be cruising in La Liga, but Xavi and Puyol are on the wrong side of 30 and Messi’s recent injury scare left Barca badly exposed; Real Madrid is ready to pounce. This year’s run-in doesn’t seem symptomatic of some inexorable trend that threatens to destroy football. It’s just a blip. But an important blip, because it’s easy to forget that the major European leagues are always a couple of weird-ish results away from an utterly tedious run-in. The system’s not broken, but it’s precarious.

David Yaffe-Bellany’s fantasy football coverage:

• Adventures in the Fantasy Premier League, Gameweek 32
• And Gameweek 31

And Fernando Torres looking like a total wally.

In England, it’s another story entirely. Dempsey, regarded as one of the Premier League’s most dangerous attackers, regularly scores goals for Tottenham Hotspur. By contrast, Donovan’s forays into European football have rarely convinced – he performed well during his first loan spell at Everton, but Major League Soccer’s ridiculous transfer rules precluded a permanent move, and Tim Howard is way more fun.

More interesting than parsing the minutiae of Dempsey and Donovan’s respective careers, or trying endlessly to determine whether the two players form the United States’ very own Lampard-Gerrard conundrum, is figuring out why fans and journalists insist on preferring one player over the other. Player comparisons are, of course, a standard part of football analysis – just as fundamental to an amateur sports blogger’s existence as microwavable meals and the childhood bedroom that mom and dad carefully preserved. But the truth here runs much deeper: Dempsey and Donovan represent rival notions of the Way We Ought To Promote American Soccer[1]. Donovan is a made-for-TV celebrity who doesn’t want to leave LA because he’s “passionate” about helping Major League Soccer “grow”; he’s getting people to watch MLS! Dempsey is an ambitious hipster who plays high-level football in London and whose family is boringly stable; he’s introducing American soccer to a European audience! People were always going to choose sides.

At the moment, Donovan’s on some kind of extended sabbatical: he was recently photographed relaxing on a Cambodian island. He’s set to return to MLS action in a few weeks, but it’s unclear whether he’s interested in advancing what’s left of his once promising professional football career. With long-time United States captain Carlos Bocanegra adrift in the Spanish second division (and therefore not in a position to contribute anything beyond reassuring monosyllables to a team that can’t afford to waste roster spots on 33-year-old center backs), Dempsey skippered the US against Costa Rica and Mexico. The captaincy is mostly symbolic, and, as Dempsey surely knows, in England, it exists solely as a mechanism for John Terry controversy. But the fact that Klinsmann, who has encouraged American players to move abroad, chose Dempsey as captain, and that the only other candidate was AS Roma’s Michael Bradley, is indicative of a broader change in American soccer. These days, the best American players play in Europe[2]. Donovan is in an ever-shrinking minority, and for that he has Dempsey to thank.

Watching AVB try to turn stodgy, defensive Chelsea into a genuinely entertaining football team was sad in a way that could’ve been kind of funny – but wasn’t. And it always seemed to be raining.

When Villas-Boas signed for Chelsea, he was young, energetic, and so enthusiastic about 4-3-3 that he made the whole notion of an attacking trident seem way more exciting than it was ever going to be. AVB’s treble-winning season at Porto marked the peak of football’s obsession with the Mourinho-esque Euro-snob manager: as Grantland’s Brian Phillips put it, you couldn’t “mow a field in the Iberian Peninsula without finding six or seven sharply dressed and tactically savvy managers under toadstools and rocks.”

These days, although fans are not exactly immune to the power of good looks and rolling consonants, they are much warier. No one wants his club to fall into the AVB trap. Which is a shame, since Villas-Boas’ performance this season proves that his failure at Stamford Bridge was more a function of Chelsea’s pervasive ridiculousness than of anything else. Just ask Rafa Benitez what he thinks…

That’s not to say Villas-Boas didn’t make mistakes at Chelsea. Last year, his stubborn adherence to the gospel of 4-3-3 frustrated fans and players; this campaign, he’s been much more flexible. When injury ended Sandro’s season in early January, AVB turned Dembele and Parker into Spurs’ default midfield partnership, and the two have excelled. He’s also rejiggered Spurs’ forward line, rotating the likes of Sigurdsson, Bale, Lennon, Dempsey, and Holtby in an effort to compensate for Defoe’s long absences and Adebayor’s continued descent into that magical world where overpaid athletes complain, sulk and refuse to score goals.

A couple of weeks ago, Spurs right back Kyle Walker went out of his way to describe “the gaffer” as “class — even in terms of man-management.” That’s quite a compliment, especially considering Villas Boas’ uncomfortable relationship with the Chelsea squad, which, to be fair, contained John Terry, arguably the most difficult character in English football. Jaded by his experiences with Terry and Roman Abramovich, a lesser man than AVB might have returned to continental Europe, taken a cozy job somewhere in Italy or Spain, and spent weekend nights talking tactics with an articulate center back over gigantic cigars and a bottle of something foreign-sounding.

But Villas-Boas isn’t like that. Villas-Boas didn’t leave the city.

More fantasy football articles for EPL Talk

• Adventures in the Fantasy Premier League, Gameweek 28
• Adventures in the Fantasy Premier League, Gameweek 29

And some Tottenham Hotspur analysis

• Are Tottenham Too Fragile to Remain in Third Place?

And a picture of Jan Vertonghen pretending to grab something.

If I were gullible and stupid and slightly angry, and if I had just finished reading a couple of weeks’ worth of football News And Views, here’s what I would say/think/cry about:

Football’s future rests in the hands of a Singaporean gangster with a rhyming name and a proclivity for avoiding arrest. Within the last decade, he and the rest of his gang have fixed (or attempted to fix) hundreds of matches, including one played in England. Every weekend, greedy, venal, obnoxious professional footballers feign injury in order to gain minuscule advantages. On the sidelines, their coaches wave imaginary yellow cards, the spray-painted boundaries of the coaches’ “technical area” just sort of sitting there, totally ignored. Luis Suarez is racist; John Terry might be. I don’t know whether Sepp Blatter exists, but I’m pretty certain that a zombie with Sepp Blatter’s voice is running FIFA and that Michel Platini has spent the last decade plotting his murder. FIFA, by the way, has faced intense criticism in the wake of allegations that the process by which it selected hosts for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups was just as corrupt as Europol’s 680.

Yaya Toure makes more than 200,000 pounds a week. Yaya Toure makes more than 200,000 pounds a week. I think it’s fair to say that Portsmouth has almost gone out of business more times than is healthy. The guy with the drum, tattoos and wig owns a bookstore – they just don’t make hooligans like they used to. Only, they kind of do: in Holland, youth players kicked a linesman to death. A few months later, AC Milan midfielder Kevin Prince Boateng abandoned an exhibition game because the Italian crowd made monkey noises every time he touched the ball. According to Grantland’s Brian Phillips, “Soccer. Is. Fucked.”

Except I’m not gullible, etc., and football isn’t fucked. Not by a long shot.

 –

Two weeks ago, 16 English teams participated in the fifth-round of the FA Challenge Cup. Supposedly, the FA Cup is England’s most historic major competition, which basically means that its name isn’t attached to a sponsor’s[1] and that Prince William occasionally catches a game. In theory, it’s a tournament that any team can win. It’s old and respectable and whenever the FA tweaks it – eliminating semi-final replays, playing semi-finals at Wembley, ditching the traditional 3 pm kick-off for the cup final, moving the final to a Premier League weekend – an increasingly resigned minority expresses unhappiness. In one of those eight fifth-round games, Oldham Athletic scored a controversial last-minute equalizer against Everton. Tim Howard waved his arms in the air.

No one thinks that the match was anything other than an uplifting tale of David Draws With Goliath. No one thinks that maybe the game was fixed; that maybe Oldham — through a network of Malaysian agents, Hungarian mobsters and Singaporean gambling syndicates — has fixed every one of its FA Cup games; that maybe the 3-2 win over Liverpool that turned Matt Smith into a minor celebrity and Oldham into something more than just Paul Scholes’ favorite team was in fact the final, most lucrative step in Dan Tan’s latest attempt to make English football his own personal playpen.

No one thinks that the match was fixed because there’s absolutely no reason to think that Dan Tan’s criminal aspirations have made any impact whatsoever on genuinely meaningful football matches – by which I mean matches that aren’t dead-rubber World Cup qualifiers or long-forgotten episodes in the (thankfully) long-abandoned Intertoto Cup[2]. Obviously, match-fixing is a major problem in Italian football, but it’s unclear whether the Serie A games implicated in Europol’s recent investigation are newly discovered, unpunished fixes, or whether they’re the same games that comprised the much-discussed Calciopoli and Calcioscommesse scandals. The two “suspicious” Champions League matches both featured Hungarian minnow Debrecen, whose goalkeeper has already been punished for his involvement in attempted match-fixing[3].

Premier League clubs have marginalized the FA Cup to the point where the Latvian third-division sometimes seems like a decent alternative to the drudgery of third-round weekend. The English domestic cup competitions are basically footballing compost heaps. The FA Cup is tedious and poorly attended and, as I write this sentence, Sir Alex Ferguson is preparing a reserve team for Manchester United’s fifth-round match against Reading. If I wake up tomorrow morning and find out that Arsenal has withdrawn from all future domestic knockout tournaments in order to concentrate on Champions League qualification, I won’t be all that surprised. So the fact that the recent spate of match-fixing controversy hasn’t come remotely close to touching England’s Most Historic Competition is a strong indication that we’re not quite as fucked as the cynics say we are. Journalists jump at the opportunity to hammer the FA Cup — yet no one thinks that Oldham Athletic is corrupt. Because it’s not. By no stretch of the imagination is the cup what it used to be, but at least it’s 100 percent honest, even if the sixth-round draw was officially the Budweiser Sixth-Round Draw, even if Prince William has other (I hesitate to say more important) engagements on his calendar.

–

I don’t think football is fucked. Perfect it is not, but fucked? Really?

It’s easy to see football, or even sport in general, as a game of make-believe that pretends to occupy some hallowed zone of cultural relevancy while isolating its participants, and even its consumers, from the very culture it’s supposed to represent. John Terry’s football (and his attendant badge-kissing and chest-pumping) excites millions of fans around the world, but Terry himself is nothing like those fans – or, indeed, like anyone those fans have ever encountered in normal adult life – and he’s done more to expand the gulf between the average, “hardworking”[4] supporter and the Nike-clad football behemoths whose jerseys supporters buy with hard-earned money that could have been spent on other things, like food, than any of his contemporaries, and that includes Djibril Cisse. It’s easy to think that. I know this argument pretty well because I hear it all the time: on podcasts, on TV shows, in daily conversation, etc.

John Terry The Cartoon Brat is what people think of when they think of modern football. Which is a shame. Terry is a talented footballer who genuinely cares, who deflects his cynical detractors with the same intensity and willpower that enables him to block goal-bound shots and perform goal-saving sliding tackles. He isn’t a model husband, but what does that have to do with anything?

–

Earlier this month, Robbie Rogers announced on his personal blog that he’s gay, he’s retiring, and those two things might be connected.

Rogers’ blog post did not condemn football’s treatment of gay people, at least not unambiguously. But since he announced both his sexual preference and his retirement in the same post, it’s reasonable to assume some kind of causal relationship. Over the last few months, a lot of pseudo-politicians have spent a lot of Swiss-accented energy complaining about racism in football, cheating in football, and technology in football. We’re no closer to kicking the imaginary yellow card out of our sport, but people in the Premier League community sure are talking about it, which was more than could be said for gay rights before Rogers’ coming out.

In response to Rogers’ post, a number of American players (including Marc Burch and Colin Clark, who have both served suspensions for using homophobic slurs during matches) tweeted their support. I always knew Rogers was good, but I never imagined he had so many “bros.” But again, it’s easy to look at this cynically. Where were these guys when Rogers really needed help, when he was battling “the pain from hiding such a deep secret”? And what about all the players who didn’t go out of their way to support him after his announcement? And Sepp Blatter thinks women should wear tighter shorts. And Luis Suarez is one of the Premier League’s top scorers. And Yaya Toure makes more than 200,000 pounds a week.

If you wanted to, you could take all of this at face value, and you’d probably come to Phillips’ conclusion[5]. It looks bad – trust me, I realize that. But, and maybe this is because I’m a naïve adolescent whose knowledge of the Real World is 100 percent theoretical, I simply can’t reconcile this pessimism with the reality of football as I know it.

–

David Foster Wallace once claimed that the key to “making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head” [6] is “awareness of what is real and essential…hidden in plain sight all around us.”[7] That’s pretty much where I stand on the whole “football is fucked” debate. It’s not that the debate is a waste of time; on the contrary, it’s vital (after all, some leagues are bent – just not the ones we really care about). But I feel as if we’re missing something. Reflexive cynicism is just as lazy as reflexive optimism — it just doesn’t seem quite as lame and sentimental. Maybe if we weren’t so scared of being perceived as sentimental, the game itself, the stuff that goes on between the lines, wouldn’t seem so fucked. Maybe we’d learn to appreciate John Terry’s footballing qualities: his ability to block shots, intercept passes, attack corners. People who bemoan “the state of modern football” because Ryan Giggs slept with his sister-in-law, or because Europol held a dramatic press conference to announce that Certain Asian Gamblers Are Unscrupulous, are missing the point. There’s a lot of beauty in football, a lot of good people. Yaya Toure makes more than 200,000 pounds a week, but his goals inspire millions of Ivorian children.

Sepp Blatter? He’s fucked. But football? Absolutely not.

Typically, football fans refer to the ACON – which used to be held during World Cup and European Championship years, but which is adjusting its rotation in an almost certainly futile effort to garner more prestige/viewers/Jonathan Wilson columns – as a “festival of football,” a term that’s rooted in the utterly erroneous, semi-racist perception of Africa as a place where tribe members chant exotic chants and bang exotic drums and just generally have a good time. (For reasons that don’t make very much sense, the whole concept of this, like, giant football party! gained popularity during the South African World Cup.) Of course, African football is nothing like that. After the first wave of Cameroon-got-to-the-quarters-and-Pele-thinks-Africa-will-win-a-World-Cup hysteria passed, Africans spent more than a decade dealing with corruption and white elephant stadiums and teenage stars whose “burgeoning talents” (or whatever) turned out to be figments of some gossip website’s imagination.

Which is why last year’s competition was so uplifting. For the first time in a long time, African football produced a story that was both genuinely moving and genuinely gripping. Zambia’s penalty-shootout victory over the Ivory Coast was one of last year’s most talked-about matches, and, despite Zambia’s recent struggles, people are still talking about it.

Unless they’re talking about Cape Verde, the smallest (population: 501,000) quarter-finalist in the history of the Africa Cup of Nations. Or Didier Drogba’s last chance to, you know, do something that doesn’t involve tragic penalty misses and their attendant Drogba Fails Again newspaper articles, and how his team blew that chance in typically disappointing fashion, losing 2-1 to Nigeria.

The Africa Cup of Nations isn’t the world’s most thrilling spectacle. In terms of pure sporting excitement, it’s about as good as a mediocre World Cup (which is to say most World Cups). And the empty stadiums are depressing on many levels. But the players obviously care; that’s why so many of the Premier League’s African stars (not all of them, however – I’m looking at you, Peter Odemwingie) abandon their club teams during one of the season’s most important stretches. In an era in which Steven Gerrard suffers mysterious “injuries” on the eve of every England game, there’s a lot to be said for tournaments that actually mean something.