So my TL is full of Liverpool this morning, naturally. I am reading what an amazing achievement their title is, and to be fair I think beating Man City probably is amazing. But I find the response fascinating, and in particular I find Big Club (TM) fans fascinating.

Liverpool haven’t won a 20 team league, they have - charitably - won a 6 team league, and more accurately won a 2 team league. As I said, beating Man City is hard but let’s not pretend it’s the Little Engine That Could. Only privileged clubs can win the league and they’re one

In that regard I view their win as exactly the same as any of Man Utd’s. They’ll take great umbrage at this but I just see all these teams as one great homogeneous mass. Of course there are micro differences but in what way are the Big 6 materially any different from each other?

Liverpool/Man City are good, Chelsea a bit behind but always close, Man Utd/Arsenal are hilarious but will eventually return as soon as they appoint competent people. Only Spurs are Big Six without ever winning anything. The revenues of these teams have made competition extinct.

(I must grudgingly admit that Spurs are slightly different having spent cleverly to get into the elite. But now they’re there they are wasting no time in helping to pull up the ladder to ensure there is never again any competition).

I’d be interested to know what fans of other smaller teams think. To me the differences are only in temporary things like the people involved. Take Klopp, I love him (who couldn’t) but he doesn’t change the fact that Liverpool have privilege that only a handful of teams can.

To use a bad analogy, it feels to me like there are 14 teams in canoes, Arsenal in a motorized dinghy that David Luiz is steering with his feet and the other 5 in speedboats. It’s not really an achievement to beat the canoes is it?

I guess I’m bemused by interviews of fans of a team winning a 19th league title being portrayed as having suffered some sort of hardship by waiting 30 years for a title. WHU are allegedly a big club, existed 125 years, have never won it and never will.

It’s that part I find fascinating- there is no sense of embarrassment in any coverage of this. Aren’t Big Club fans just the slightest bit red faced at routinely being subsidised by UEFA and the PL to the tune of hundreds of millions more than competitors? And then beating them?

And cherry picking our best players and managers as soon as they notice them, safe in the knowledge that more vast sums of money are on the way from the authorities to maintain the gap? Again I stress this isn’t particularly about Liverpool, they’re at the same trough as the rest

Liverpool fans are more in thrall to the legend of their “otherness” than any Big Club fans, however. At heart I think it’s because there is an inherent understanding of their privilege that forces this desire to project an image of being special in other ways. It’s a bit odd.

I mean, it’s fine to come to West Ham and sing “Fuck the Tories” (really, fair enough) but surely you have to acknowledge the absolute sham of a financial structure that benefits you at the top hugely, at the expense of the vast majority of others, as you do it?

I can already hear the “Net Spend” arguments from here as though Liverpool didn’t spend £35m on Andy Carroll and just carry on as if it didn’t matter. Because it didn’t. Meanwhile Burnley’s record signing is £15m.

(By the way I’m well aware that fans of non PL clubs might think all this applies equally to WHU as compared to lower league teams - and I think they’d be right, even allowing for West Ham’s catastrophically stupid owners and management)

This ended up being a lot longer than I anticipated to say “I don’t care who wins the PL, they’re all the same”. There has been precisely one interesting PL winner - Leicester, God bless them. Maybe other fans feel differently- I’d be interested to know.

My solution, if anyone cares

https://twitter.com/thehlist/status/1020281196654333952?s=21 https://twitter.com/thehlist/status/1020281196654333952