The Premier League has descended into playground football – and it’s great

There are two types of entertaining football match.

There are those where some of the best players in the world combine for team moves and flashes of individual quality to produce captivating moments of sporting drama. There are also those where some of the best players in the world forget years of physical and mental training for reasons best known to themselves, and delirious chaos ensues.

The 2023-24 Premier League season has served a heady dose of both. The world’s richest league, home to some of the most technically and physically gifted players on the planet, has produced games in which viewers can find the very frontiers of the sport being pushed… as well as matches in which teams forget the need for central midfield and leave talented attackers completely free on set pieces.

Neutrals bemoaning the “tactically intriguing” chess match of Manchester City’s 0-0 draw against Arsenal on March 31 would have been delighted with the ridiculous scenes that played out four days later between Chelsea and Manchester United, when Erik ten Hag’s side were 3-2 up in the 100th minute and still contrived to lose.

Yet the really striking thing about events at Stamford Bridge on Thursday night was that it wasn’t even a surprise. Not this season, anyway. That was the sixth match to finish 4-3 this campaign, already tied with the most ever in the Premier League era along with 1994-95 (when the Premier League had 22 clubs) and 2001-02.

This season has also seen a sharp increase in the number of goals per game, a knock-on effect of the substantial amounts of stoppage time being offered at the end of each half.  Teams are improving on both sides of the ball at a rapid rate, but gutsy rest defence and coherent out-of-possession shape can only account for so much in a league full of tactical variance, a troubling spike in injuries and refereeing controversy.

Upon its inception in 1992, Sky Sports promoted the Premier League as a competition where any team is capable of beating another. The 2023-24 competition has taken that marketing notion and tweaked it: any game is capable of finishing with virtually any scoreline, with matches lurching from complex tactical battles into incomprehensible melees on the swing of someone’s boot.

To paraphrase Mike Tyson’s famous quote, “Every Premier League side has a plan until someone whips in a cross towards the back post.”

To heighten the sense of drama, we are also seeing more late goals than at any other point in the Premier League era (another consequence of all that extra stoppage time). After 303 matches played (accurate on April 5), no other Premier League season has offered more goals scored after the 85th minute.

Andrea Agnelli and Gerard Pique have both tried to (somewhat misleadingly) claim that young people who have short attention spans have little interest in watching games in their entirety. The 2023-24 season seems to want to put that to the test by jam-packing its drama in its final stages.

Jurgen Klopp, Mikel Arteta and Pep Guardiola may be tussling for the league title, with their finely curated squads, but this season  also contains a handful of teams that want to play a defensive style of football but find it difficult to defend well (Crystal Palace and Brentford, for example).

There is another group of clubs who are most dangerous when counter-attacking but have little idea how to defend (Manchester United and West Ham).

And some teams want to press high up the field but have players who are (understandably) too fatigued/injured/prematurely aged by playing too much football since 2019 to keep up with the physical demands (Tottenham and Newcastle United).

The result is a season that has more comeback points per game than ever before.

And the numbers just keep on coming.

• There have only been 10 scoreless draws to date — with 77 games remaining, we are set for our lowest percentage of ‘bore draws’ in the competition’s history.
• Nearly half of Luton’s results this season have been decided by goals scored after the 80th minute.
• Brighton have not registered back-to-back Premier League wins since September and yet have never been in the bottom half this season.
• Fulham defeated Manchester United, Brighton and Tottenham by a combined score of 8-1 over four games, and then conceded six goals in matches against Sheffield United and Nottingham Forest, two of the bottom four.

Is this shift towards high-scoring frenzies a happy byproduct of exceptionally talented players facing off for longer matches? Or an unfortunate culmination of back-to-back seasons of compressed football calendars and revisions to the offside and handball laws? Your mileage may vary.

The question, ultimately, is whether this brand of highly-priced pandemonium is a good or bad thing.

Was it edifying for the league that two of the most expensively assembled squads in world football spent Thursday evening wrestling with each other with all the style and panache of two inebriated amateurs throwing haymakers?

Perhaps not, but the Premier League has prided itself on narrative-fuelled grudge matches along with games of technical excellence. Chelsea 4-3 Manchester United sated the former, while Thursday’s other game, Liverpool 3-1 Sheffield United, took care of other needs.

Football is at its best when every player on the field is performing at their peak, tussling for mastery over each other. It is at its funniest when very talented people begin to make very foolish mistakes and methods of control revert to chaos.

There is a certain joy in watching the supposed pinnacle of club football resemble a schoolyard kickabout.

The Premier League’s financial weight gives it a strong claim to being the “best” league in the world. This season’s embracing of high-scoring ridiculousness may confirm it as the planet’s most entertaining.

(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)