Fear of Relegation Dulls Premiership Play

Listening to the guys on Fox Soccer Channel you'd think the English Premier League was soccer perfection, overflowing with excitement and skill, brimming with memorable games.

Pull the other one, guys. This past weekend FSC gave us four EPL games, all of them duds. Bland, featureless games that featured only eight goals. Perfection? The games ranged from acceptable (Middlesbrough vs. Manchester United) to totally boring (Reading vs. Bolton) to utterly awful (Blackburn vs. Fulham).

The English are proud of their league; they like to promote it as the world's best, the most exciting. FSC, of course, tags along with a welter of mindless promos. But the boast, never true anyway, is reduced to tatters by recent statistics: With an average of 2.14 goals a game, the EPL is currently the lowest scoring league in Europe, lower even than the defense-minded Italian Serie A that is managing 2.52 a game.

Of course, goal scoring is not the only yardstick for measuring a game's worth. But it's the only statistical one we have, and it does provide a pretty reliable indication of the excitement level: Fewer goals indicate more defensive soccer, and defensive soccer means, without a doubt, a rise in the tedium level.

The English have a habit, whenever anything negative crops up in their soccer, of blaming it on foreign players. Of whom there are plenty in the EPL: 49% of the players now come from outside the British Isles.

That heavy foreign influence has been openly blamed for a decline in the sportsmanship level of the game — in particular for the rise in diving that is typically seen as a foreign form of cheating. And now it is being blamed for the rise of defensive play — something allegedly being imported by foreign coaches like the Portuguese Jose Mourinho at Chelsea and Spaniard Rafael Benitez at Liverpool.

Blaming outsiders is a knee-jerk response with a long history — they are the "mischievous strangers" who were blamed for the industrial strife in Charles Dickens's "Hard Times," published over 150 years ago, but it invariably hides the real cause of the trouble.

The EPL's current problem — that fact that an increasing number of its teams are playing boring, defensive soccer — is not caused by foreigners. The problem is money — too much of it. The billions poured into the EPL since the early 1990s by Rupert Murdoch's Sky Television have utterly distorted the traditional English soccer scene.

It used to be that England's 90-odd professional teams were split into the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th divisions. There was movement between the four groups: If you finished in the top two or three of your division you moved up, while the bottom finishers above you moved down. This was a system that worked well for about 100 years — until television money started to swamp everything.

The big clubs wanted that money. In 1992 they formed a new league — an elite league. The designation of "First Division"was no longer good enough. A new elite league was born: The Premier League. A different name — and a different world. Suddenly the gap between the Premier League and the old First Division below it was enormous.

There is still promotion to and relegation from the EPL, but relegation — which used to be a disappointment for a club, maybe a minor tragedy — is now a financial disaster. Look at today's figures: In the share-out of television money, the bottom club in the EPL gets $60 million. The top club in the Championship (the renamed First Division) gets $2.5 million.

Not only is there now a huge financial gap between the EPL and the other three divisions of English soccer, there is a growing financial gap within the EPL. On top of the pile are the rich clubs — notably Chelsea, Arsenal, and Manchester United, three clubs that have shared 13 of the 14 EPL championships so far played.

A much larger group of about a dozen clubs knows that its chances of winning the EPL are effectively zero. The big concern of these clubs therefore, is to make sure they do not get relegated — that they remain in the EPL where the big bucks are.

It is fear of descending into the relatively poverty-stricken lower divisions of English soccer that is at the root of the defensive malaise afflicting English soccer.

Soccer is a sport in which it is considerably easier to defend than to attack. By loading a team with defensive players and employing defensive tactics, a coach can go a long way to making it unlikely that his team will give up any goals — and maybe a single goal can be scored to win the game.

Over half the EPL teams can be considered potential relegation candidates, a situation that creates a surefire recipe for unadventurous soccer — and that is what, increasingly, the EPL is giving us. Some of the soccer presented in the weekend's televised EPL games was simply appalling in its banality and crudity.

One of the worst offenders was Bolton, a North of England club from Lancashire that has not won a major title since 1958. It has played 16 games in this season's EPL but has scored only 15 goals. Even so, such is the general shortage of scoring in the EPL, that Bolton's anemic output is good enough to have the team in ninth place in the 20-team league.

This defensive mode is quite new to English soccer. Whatever its past sins may have been, playing defensively was never one of them. English teams always went forward, frequently rather brainlessly, but the style made for the much-admired high-speed frenzy of the English game — the style that earned the "thud-and-blunder" tag.

Much of the full-blooded commitment of English soccer is still there, but the end product — goals, or at least goal-mouth action — has gone missing.

The EPL is reported to rake in some $1 billion from overseas sales of its television rights. But the foreign viewers are being badly misled. The soccer on view is generally inferior stuff, certainly not up to the standards of the Spanish league, for instance.

The English-language commentators who come with the games do not help matters by frequently reminding viewers what a great game they're watching and how superior the EPL is. And neither do their awful mispronunciations of the foreign players' names.

The EPL being offered with such ballyhoo on FSC is a fraud. This is not the best, nor the most exciting league in the world. Merely the richest.

pgardner@nysun.com