The Premier League’s top six is now a standard and accepted part of life in English football. They are the teams substantially better than the rest and they have created a two tier league. They are also the teams who are likely to divide up the three trophies amongst themselves.
What’s interesting, though, is when faced with such a homogeneous mass, hoovering up the silverware, they aren’t all treated as one. Despite all fighting for the same trophies, and being seen as roughly equal (perhaps apart from Manchester City at the moment), they are each seen as having different objectives and different views of success by the media.
Accordingly, they are all given very different coverage. That’s not to say any club gets it harder than any others exactly, but it’s telling that we’re not talking about one rule for everyone.
Below is a look at how each team’s coverage is different to the rest.
Manchester City
If we’re being honest, the media suffer from a certain schizophrenia when covering City. Their brand of football is undeniably thrilling. It is record breaking and it innovative, too, which means it can’t be given anything other than praise.On the other hand, tired journalists can’t surely be expected to reach past the ‘they’ve spent more money than anyone else’ chestnut, can they? To be fair, no other Premier League team has ever spent money.
Manchester United
Defeat to Sevilla in the Champions League will always add a sour flavour to what comes next in this article, but United are still second in the league, they are still in FA Cup and they will more than likely secure a top four place in the coming weeks. To have finished sixth last season and fifth the season before, second in the league and their best Champions League finish since the days of David Moyes is progress.
Yet Jose Mourinho’s United are vilified. Perhaps that’s fair enough given their turgid style of play, the money they’ve spent, and the fact they’ve suffered some high profile defeats this season. Still, they are behind only a record-breaking City and have progress to point to.
Indeed, even last season’s trophies were won by the skin of their teeth: victory over an unlucky Southampton side, and a Europa League final they only qualified for thanks to a John Guidetti miss in the final seconds of their semi-final tie against Celta Vigo.
As dull as it is to watching this United side, it’s harsh to criticise them quite so strongly.
Tottenham
The paradoxes, though, start to arrive when we move on to Tottenham.
Spurs are, to all intents and purposes, media darlings whose young, developing team play football in a modern style. Their coach is up and coming and their squad is, too. It’s not difficult to see why they are seen as the pin-ups for football done the right way. The extent of their praise might grate on fans of other teams, but it’s not completely undeserved.
The problem, though, is that they can finish fourth, win nothing, get knocked out of the Champions League in the last 16 and get praise for doing it, despite being described as being better than other members of the top six. Arsene Wenger must be rocking in a corner somewhere after a decade of being whipped from pillar to post for doing pretty much the same thing yet adding three trophies, too.
Yet Spurs also have to put up with a parallel narrative which is a little less becoming: they are also subject to questions about their inability to ‘just win a trophy’. If they don’t, we’re told that all their best players and their manager will leave.
Well, do Liverpool – one point behind Spurs in the league and in broadly the same position as their north London counterparts – have to put up with suggestions that their best players and manager will leave soon ‘in search of trophies’ if they don’t manage to bag the League Cup?
Liverpool
Neatly, that brings us along to the Reds who don’t quite have that pressure, but they do have a similar one.
If they don’t win a trophy, there’s little debate about whether their players or manager will leave, but at the same time those suggestions are never far away from Liverpool anyway – whether they win a League Cup or not.
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Why? Because they aren’t seen as the creme de la creme of English football any more for some reason: Philippe Coutinho left, Luis Suarez left and, if Mohamed Salah continues to bag hatfuls of goals, he could be next on the list of players to join an El Clasico giant.
That has little to do with winning a trophy, mind. They’d need to be consistently fighting for league titles and European honours to ward off that interest. The ‘just one trophy’ narrative around Spurs doesn’t really apply in the same way.
Chelsea
Rather than a media narrative around Chelsea, perhaps this one is man-made. Every year, the Blues are in one of two positions, on the up on in decline.
Last season, they won the league thanks to the cleverness of Antonio Conte’s 3-4-3 system and his ability to shock his rivals, they could well have ended as double winners, too: something which would have given them two of the three trophies available to them.
This year, the season hadn’t even started before the talk of Conte’s departure began, such is the expectation that a season after a title win is when the Blues implode. To a certain extent that’s fair, but it’s hugely unhelpful. Chelsea can still win two trophies this season, even if they league is long gone (like it is for everyone other than City). That would be a huge achievement.
Arsenal
Arsene Wenger must be pulling his hair out at what’s happening at Tottenham. They get to finish fourth, get dumped out of the last 16 of the Champions League and be praised to the nines. They don’t even have to win the FA Cup.
The double standards are shocking but in a way they’re justified: Spurs are an exciting team who are only getting better. Arsenal are only getting worse, it seems. But if the top six are to be treated equally, why should one team get away with praise from the very same results that elicit anger and disappointment in another?
