The Premier League has always been an economic colossal ever since its birth 23 years ago, with the extortionate television dealings that somehow seem to only increase each year and everything else that is ploughed into its core. Of course, this excessive amount of money the league provides is due to the undoubtedly high quality of entertainment that millions engross in every week. From the ridiculous amount of money involved, it has enticed multibillionaires, such as Roman Abramovich and Sheikh Mansour, to invest their fortune in football clubs to take advantage of the potential financial gain. However, this has led the league to replicate a seemingly unbreakable hierarchy.
The Unforgiving Hierarchy of the Premier League
These two financial giants took over Chelsea and Manchester City respectively and almost straightaway catapulted them to the top end of the table, and with no sign of ever needing to be wary of any kind of mid-table mediocrity for certainly years. At the top of the table, these two sides are accompanied with the ever-present Arsenal and Manchester United, whilst Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur are constantly lurking in and around the others. Excluding the odd occasion where another side squeezes in at the top, these six clubs have generally always been standing tall above the rest and are fundamentally the aristocracy of the hierarchy. Every other club can only look up in envy at the size and stature of the elite as they cannot find a solution to permanently sit themselves among the aristocracy of the league.
After all, there is only one Roman Abramovich and one Sheikh Mansour, and as these two in particular have demonstrated, it seems the only way to project yourself to the top is by injecting a substantial amount of money to prise the world’s best to join your team. And this is what the teams in the next stage of the hierarchy cannot compete with: by not being able to compete with the ‘aristocracy’ in financial terms, they stand no chance in bringing top names through the doors to be able to challenge in quality terms on the field. Therefore, the likes of Stoke, West Ham and Southampton are stuck in mid-table mediocrity constantly. The latter, Southampton, are a prime example of not having the strength to be able to sustain such a tremendous start that they did have at the start of last season that posed a real threat to the elite.
Nevertheless, they soon faded out and had to settle for the coveted ‘best of the rest’ title in seventh position. Hence, this section of the hierarchy can be deemed to be like the oligarchy in where they are defined as a small group of people who have control. This control of course, is the teams below them, but they are subsidised like the rest over the aristocracy. As a consequence to what occurs above, we have the tyranny, which are the ‘yo-yo clubs’ who cruelly suffer from the unforgiving nature of the league. As they are constantly in a desperate scrap for survival season upon season where there is no mercy from any team. Due to half the time missing the television revenue the Premier League offers when they have to ply their trade in the second tier of English football, they are unable to compete financially with the ‘oligarchy’ for players and are left with the scraps.
Both these bottom sections of the hierarchy, however, share the same recurring theme that keeps them away from the aristocracy. Every team manages to boast a star player or two. Unfortunately, every team are unable to hold onto their star players. Southampton having to offload the likes of Adam Lallana and Morgan Schneiderlin in the last two seasons highlights this. Moreover, Swansea lost their talisman of Wilfred Bony to Manchester City for a reported £28m in January, and the list could carry on.
Because of this, all these teams have to replace their star assets constantly rather than to complement them and thus why there are in a state of equilibrium as they can never progress when they are in a constant cycle of replacing players.
This is what sets the elite aside. They are the only clubs that are able to complement their world stars with even more world stars, which further strengthens their squad and pushes them even further away from the rest. The only way a team is ever going to add themselves to the aristocracy is by keeping a hold of their stars and adding to them, as hard as it may be.
