Enjoy the new Premier League season, there might not be many more like it

New York Times

a day ago

If, like all of my social circle, you did not follow this summer's expanded Club World Cup, you missed some decent games, a few upsets, a lot of Donald Trump and a surprise win for Chelsea.
It was fine, but fine was good enough to ensure it will happen again in four years' time — perhaps sooner — and that means you also possibly missed the beginning of the end of football as most of us know it.
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When the new Premier League season starts tomorrow evening, many of the world's best players will embark on an 11-month season that will finish at next summer's World Cup, the old-fashioned one but with 48 teams and 104 games, not 32 and 64, as per recent editions. This will be less than five weeks after Chelsea beat Paris Saint-Germain in New York, but only two weeks after Manchester United drew with Everton to clinch the Premier League's very own American showcase event, the Summer Series.
It is not just the world's best players who are now locked into an endless content-creation cycle. The first round of Champions League qualifying took place on July 8, the same day Chelsea beat Fluminense in the semi-final of the Club World Cup, a tournament that neither brought the curtain down on 2024-25 nor raised it for 2025-26 — there is no curtain anymore.
The lower leagues in Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and elsewhere in northern Europe are always early starters, but England's Leagues One and Two began their new campaigns on August 1. In fact, League Two's Barnet and Newport County had already played each other in an EFL Cup preliminary round on July 29 — in other words, before most of their fans had gone on their summer holidays, let alone taken some time off to enjoy the cricket season, the Lions tour, a music festival, a summer fete, anything other than football, basically.
The English Football League had no choice but to start so early, as it is the only way to ensure there is room in the schedule to include the record nine Premier League teams who have qualified for European football this season when they join the competition in the third round.
What else can the EFL do when UEFA adds a third European competition, the Conference League, in 2021, and then expands all three of its club competitions in 2024, adding extra games and teams? The Champions League leapt from 125 to 189 games last season — once that happened, every new edition of the EFL Cup is a minor miracle.
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The EFL could just stop scheduling it, I suppose, but Premier League clubs appear to like winning it, as do their fans. Newcastle United's certainly did.
It also makes up a big chunk of the EFL's broadcast revenues and the Premier League's participation in the competition is one of the least painful contributions the top flight makes to the rest of the professional pyramid. Take that away and Premier League boss Richard Masters is going to have an even harder time trying to convince his shareholders to send more money down the pipe before the new independent football regulator makes them.
But that is not his only headache.
Masters has been talking about the fact that the Premier League has been the same size and shape for more than three decades — 20 teams, 380 games — for several years now.
He was at it again earlier this month, when the BBC asked him why the Premier League does not just shrink to 18 teams. After all, that was the original idea back in 1992, when the Football Association encouraged the top clubs to break away from the EFL, its ancient rival, and form the Premier League. The clubs were only half-listening, though, and having cut the top division from 22 teams to 20, decided to stop there.
'I don't think we should be forced into that decision,' said Masters.
'I am all for the growth of the game and the exciting competitions our clubs can participate in, but not at the expense of domestic football.'
FIFA and UEFA have been dropping not-so-subtle hints that 18-team leagues, with a maximum of 306 games, is where everyone should have arrived by now.
Germany's Bundesliga has had 18 teams since 1965, but France's Ligue 1 got the memo in 2023, having scrapped its second domestic cup competition three years earlier. This means only England, Italy and Spain still have 20-team leagues in Europe.
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Italy's Serie A actually voted on whether to go to 18 teams last year, but the clubs backed the status quo by a 16-4 margin. Ominously, the less-is-more quartet were the Milan duo, Juventus and Roma. If La Liga put it to their clubs in Spain, we can be fairly sure of how Barcelona and Real Madrid would vote.
For what it is worth, that French decision looks worse with every passing season, as their domestic television deal has cratered and PSG, insulated by Qatari sovereign wealth and their overseas earnings, have disappeared into the distance. Everyone apart from them could use the extra matchday revenue and broadcast inventory now.
But big clubs have broad horizons, with foreign fans and global sponsors. UEFA and now FIFA have shown them the value of international competition and they want more of it, which means less time for domestic chores.
Would England's aristocrats vote to cut the Premier League?
Maybe, maybe not. Unlike their European peers, they can still see the benefit of domestic football in their profit and loss accounts, as the Premier League, for a variety of reasons, has become the closest thing to a European Super League since the Big Six briefly conspired with Barca, Juve, Real and Co to create a more regular and lucrative place to get together than the Champions League.
A combination of crass planning, fan power and opportunistic populism on the part of the British government saw that abomination collapse inside 72 hours, but instead of being punished for their treachery, the ESL's 12 founding clubs were rewarded with an expanded Champions League and revamped Club World Cup.
With the Premier League's overseas media rights still rising in value, its stadiums full (and growing) and almost half of its clubs playing in Europe this season, the status quo looks pretty good right now. But Masters can see the writing on the wall.
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Entirely fed up with FIFA grabbing bigger chunks of the calendar, the Premier League has teamed up with Europe's other domestic leagues and the continent's players' unions to lodge a formal complaint against the global governing body at the European Commission.
By bringing European Union competition law into football's fixture squabbles, the leagues and players are telling FIFA they believe the game has reached saturation point, the players are knackered, and there are no more cup replays to scrap.
To be honest, questions could be asked as to why the leagues and players did not combine to resist UEFA's expansionism, but the European confederation at least invites representatives from the leagues and unions to its meetings before telling them it is going to create new competitions, grab more exclusive midweek slots, and maybe pinch a weekend or two. The Premier League also knows it cannot get too stroppy with an organisation that provides at least a third of its shareholders with large cheques each season, not to mention the fact that the race for European berths is a vital component of the Premier League's annual narrative.
FIFA, on the other hand, consults via press release and photo opportunity, as FIFPro, the global players' union, has been pointing out of late. And, unlike UEFA, its president, Gianni Infantino, is not trying to defend a dominant position, he is attempting to disrupt it, globalise it and own it.
Which brings us back to the Club World Cup that may have completely passed you by. Perhaps you did not watch any of the games, but you read about some poor attendances, extreme weather and a couple of mismatches. You may have only just seen a few memes of Cole Palmer doing something brilliant or funny or both.
For the record, I did not properly watch a single moment of it live, although I did read about it and watch the best clips on social media, which is not that dissimilar to how my children follow most football. The closest I got to watching it live was on holiday in Spain, where the final was on all the TVs in all the bars and restaurants that you would expect to show live football. FIFA and its Saudi-backed streaming partner DAZN may even have counted me and thousands of other passers-by that night in their viewing statistics, which is fine, as I did notice the score and got slightly interested when PSG's players and manager Luis Enrique lost their tempers at the end.
That suggests they cared about it. And Chelsea's players looked very happy afterwards, albeit a little confused as to why the U.S. president had decided to photobomb their celebrations.
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But nobody looked happier than Infantino.
He knew he had done enough to ensure Saudi money will continue to flow FIFA's way until 2034 at least, as the Gulf state appears to be all-in on its big bet on sport. He knew that if I had more friends in Africa, Asia or South America, my social circle would certainly have watched the tournament. And he also knew that the inaugural event's host, the aforementioned commander in chief, was so pleased with how it had gone that he joked at half-time that maybe he should scribble one of his presidential decrees to replace 'soccer' as the game's name in America.
'The jury is out about the competitiveness of the format and the scheduling and the underlying economics, but it is not my job to assess the success or otherwise of the Club World Cup,' Masters told the BBC.
'It is my job to assess whether these new competitions have an impact on the domestic calendar and domestic competitions, of which the Premier League is one.
'Since 1994, the Premier League has been 380 matches, 20 clubs. We haven't changed shape at all. Now we are starting to redesign our domestic calendar at the altar of European and global expansion.
'We are asking the players to play in more matches. There has to be, at the top of the game, a proper dialogue between FIFA and all the stakeholders about how these things go forward. That has been sadly missing.'
Yep, and now the only dialogue is going to be a row about whether the Club World Cup should go to 48 teams in 2029, with more spots for Masters' shareholders, or maybe we should just let FIFA do it every two years, floating from summer to winter as it crosses the globe.
If that happens, and there is no question that FIFA wants that to happen — ideally in rotation with a biennial men's World Cup — we can forget 18-team domestic top flights, with deep professional pyramids and historic national cup competitions. We will be lucky to find time for a 16-team domestic league and when that happens, we will all realise that fixture congestion was never just a problem for a handful of superstars.
So, enjoy this season — cherish it, even — because there might not be many like it left.
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