Tommy Martin: Will the Premier League still feel like a must-see when no-one is watching?
Leeds United's Jack Harrison celebrates amongst the cardboard cutouts of fans at Elland Road. Photo: PA
Leeds United are back in the Premier League, so that must mean something.
You always remember Leeds, probably because their visits to English football’s VVIP hot tub party are short but highly eventful. They make their mark.
They are like a celebrity cameo in a soap opera. They arrive on set, throw a few punches, bed a beloved matriarch, and then get killed off in a freak accident involving a shopping trolley and a canal.
But their very transience lends them significance, as if they are knowing narrators of the English football story, popping up every decade or so with a new morality tale.
For those of a certain age, they will always be the apogee of 1970s football culture, the point where thuggery and guile combined in its most thrilling form, dark lords of both the cheeky backheel and the achilles-mangling assault. Like asbestos, capital punishment and racist comics on telly, they were of their time, before PC gone mad and all that.
Younger generations will see in Leeds the cautionary Icarus of noughties football finance.
They lived the dream, famously, but awoke, with a thumping headache, in the spooning embrace of Ken Bates.
They were the last club to ‘have a go’, mortgaging the family silver on the Premier League’s version of tulip mania. Their collapse ushered in the era of oligarchs, oil barons and vulture capital. You could no longer roll the roulette wheel to win the jackpot; now you had to own the roulette wheel.
And then there was the Leeds team that won the last First Division title, the 1991/92 champions, who stare from the pages of history like a tribe of neolithic hunter-gatherers.
If the memory of that Leeds side — marshalled by the ageless Gordon Strachan, Lee Chapman perpetually heading home from close range, David Batty biting and scrapping — is of something primitive, it is not entirely the fault of manager Howard Wilkinson’s meat and potatoes approach.
It is the misfortune of that team to have been left on the platform as the Premier League’s hype train pulled out of the station. Because of the story that the Premier League has told us since, Wilko’s Warriors, holding aloft the First Division Championship trophy, now seem closer in our minds to Herbert Chapman than Pep Guardiola.
To us, the Premier League means global reach, unassailable glamour, complicated TV subscriptions. But not that much changed in 1992, or at least not right away.
Sky Sports produced a ground-breaking promo clip to announce the new era. Look at it now: a piece of high camp with John Salako in the shower, John Wark in the gym, Oldham’s Andy Ritchie looking confused, and Strachan clearly thinking he’s getting too old for this shit.
Simple Minds sing ‘Alive and Kicking’ and we are promised a whole new ball game.
Sure, it was the exact same format as the English league had used for a century and how glamorous could a league be when among its top scorers was pot-bellied Micky Quinn of Coventry City?
But look! Cheerleaders! Graphics! Richard Keys in a magenta sportscoat!
Football did change in the years that followed, for many reasons. The Bosman rule, satellite television, liberalising offside, the backpass ban and oh, did we mention unchecked global neo-liberal capitalism? It was the Premier League’s trick to make us think its success was down to its own innate magic.
So perhaps Leeds have popped up again just in time for this strangest of seasons, to remind us of the power of the Premier League dream machine as it faces its toughest test.
While there was an element of the blitz spirit about the summer’s Project Restart, what is about to ensue is more like Project Rebate, an attempt to cram in every football match promised, down to the last shitty Carabao Cup tie, lest TV companies come looking for their money back.
Football patted itself on the back after the 2019/20 season was completed amid a sense of unified purpose. But as winter stretches ahead with its grind of fixtures in empty stadia, will we once again enjoy the game’s great electric rush sweeping through months of floodlit theatrics? Or will it feel like the grim trudge of a forced march?
Plans are afoot for test events with reduced attendances, but even these feel ambitious given current infection rates. These are not just Premier League problems, of course, but those of sport and society in general — how to survive without the joy of communal celebration.
The title race, the top four, the relegation struggle — will the Premier League’s interweaving narratives seem so captivating when populated by distant, mask-wearing, Covid-bubble- dwelling figures crackling soundbites over Zoom?
Will the players grow weary of the well-paid drudgery in echoey caverns, no-one to savour their choreographed celebrations but the kit-man and Geoff Shreeves?
It is no great insight to say that modern football is a product, with the attendant marketing flim-flam that entails. But nothing brought that fact home as much as the necessity for fake crowd noise to make the viewing of behind-closed-doors football tolerable.
Some claimed to enjoy the natural sounds of the crowdless arena, the game accompanied only by the barking of centre-halves and the thud of boot on ball. Some felt it was more ‘real’.
But people don’t watch the Premier League for ‘real’. There’s enough real around at the moment, thank you very much.
So perhaps we will suspend disbelief and turn up the crowd noise, it’s ghostly chants and cheers recorded in happier times, lap up the managerial spats and the transfer sagas, debate the latest VAR mistake and live the dream again.
If not, at least Leeds are back. And that’s bound to mean something.
