Premier League Football

Football in this case means soccer, for all you guys back over on the other side of the Atlantic, and the Premier League is the top pro football organization here in England; some of the best players in the world compete in the Premier League.

Before coming to England, I had sort of assumed that the world of American sport (the NFL, major league baseball, the NBA) would have English sport beat when it came to media hype, drama, histrionics, and general hoopla. In fact I have to say that the Premier League gives American sport a run for its money.

The first thing that's interesting here is that it's not strictly English football being played; the Premier League teams draw players (and managers) from all over the world. There is almost nothing more portable than a really good football player, and because of the huge sums of money involved, you get people from virtually everywhere playing on Premier League teams, even at the less well known clubs. There is small element of this in American baseball (e.g. players from the Caribbean countries and from Central America), and in the NBA (where you have a few players now from Europe and South America), but by far the bulk of the players are American. The international element adds an interesting swirl of tensions and conflicts that you don't seem to see in American sport.

A second big difference is that because of the runup for World Cup qualifiers, you have various National teams trying to grab players away from Premier league duty so that they can play in qualifying matches and other "friendlies" for their home countries. This of course adds an interesting level of unpredictability, since you never know when player X is going to suddenly disappear from the roster for a given match (since he's off playing for his national team). There are also huge rows between the Premier League managers and the national team managers when it comes to injuries. Just about every week you read about a situation where a national team manager will "call up" an injured or recuperating player (against the wishes of his Premier League team manager), resulting in orgies of finger-pointing and angry accusations.

A third difference is that you have inter-league play, where the English teams will occasionally have matches with the top teams from Europe. American baseball has inter-league play, but it's pretty tepid stuff: it doesn't change the game in any huge way, and it does count for much. Here the inter-league games are typically quite important, since there is a separate "Champions League" (encompassing all of Europe + Russia + the UK) that the top teams want badly to win. Inter-league games are almost always very unpredictable, since you can have two powerhouse teams going up against each other having not faced off for years.

Finally there is the trading and the exchanging of players between teams, which happens at an astonishing rate, and continues on very late into the season. The amounts of money involved are staggering: for a top player, just the transfer fee along can run into the 10-20 million pound range. What's even weirder, there are cases where one team will actually loan a player to an opposing team for some number of weeks or months (don't think I have ever heard of that in the USA). This season one of the most talked-about transfers involved Robbie Keane, a top-flight striker from Tottenham Hotspur. In this bizarre tale, his club traded him to Liverpool for 20 million pounds, then Keane wound up sitting on the bench at Liverpool for several months (the Liverpool coach was apparently having a dispute with his bosses about control over transfers, if you can believe that), whereupon he was finally traded back to Tottenham again for the same amount of money. Hard to believe.

In spite of all the complicated comings and goings of the players, though, the league provides amazingly good watching. Ethan and I have been very happy with the events of the past month, which has seen a resurgence on the part of Liverpool, our favorite team. Liverpool had a fairly strong start to the season, then entered a period of "doldrums" in the middle. They just had a hard time winning games; it seemed that every match was a draw, even the ones at home. This was in part due to the fact that a number of their good players were injured. At the start of March, it looked as though the season was already wrapped up: the mighty Manchester United had what looked like an insurmountable lead in points, end of story. Then Liverpool had an absolutely incredible run: they beat Manchester United solidly (in Manchester, which is quite a trick), thumped Real Madrid (one of the top teams in Spain), and finally resounding walloped Aston Villa (probably the 4th best team in the Premier League) five to nil, all in the space of a couple of weeks. Man U proceeded to lose to Fulham (one of the weaker clubs), and although nobody would have believed it, the two teams are now virtually dead even. Much of the credit goes to Liverpool's top player and captain, Steven Gerrard, who has been absolutely unstoppable-- I have never seen anyone play as well as he has in these past few games. The lead for the Times article was "Steven Gerrard the Red Destroyer Leads Rout of Mighty Real Madrid", and for once I think the hyperbole was entirely justified. Fun stuff-- I wish I could bottle it and take it home with me to the USA.