Is what we saw at the Emirates really the beautiful game?  

A group of people who have been sentenced to play some kind of dense, claustrophobic hate‑football in an outer circle of purgatory for the last 500 years

Chelsea's Trevoh Chalobah (centre) wins a head over Arsenal's Gabriel (left) and Chelsea goalkeeper Robert Sanchez (right). Pic : Nick Potts/PA

On Thursday night at a swanky London hotel so luxuriously risk‑averse the toilets are equipped with wireless thermostats to control to within half a degree the heat of the seat, the Premier League chief executive, Richard Masters, spoke in detail for the first time about the prospect of “Premflix”, the direct‑to‑consumer model of the future, an app that will sluice this irresistible footballing opiate directly into the eyeballs of 8 billion rapt humans.

In doing so Masters was echoing the words of Todd Boehly on the same stage 12 months earlier, who had talked about the Premier League as a kind of fire stolen from the gods, source of the next great tech platform, an engine of empire, tool of world domination, of lassoing the moon out of the sky.