The Premier League it got more exciting. And it’s good, really. For the more reluctant among us, it might be hard to take this at face value, if only because the league always tells you how exciting it is already, the regular home TV presenters framing the whole experience with the polished and proselytizing look of shopping channel presenters who they’re trying to sell you a basket of cheese.
But sometimes a cheesy topping is just good. Games are exciting right now. The average standard of the teams is high. Financial might, improved scouting, the presence of global data geeks means that even weaker teams are peppered with mind-blowingly good footballing hyper-athletes. Ah yes, a club that was only recently in League One and represented on the pitch by men who look like they’ve just been dishonorably discharged from the navy. Looks like you’ve signed a 21-year-old Paraguayan genius made entirely of rubber and feathers.
Teams that lose games lose them in interesting ways. Bournemouth seem to be in a state of sustained emotional excitement, a team that plays throughout as if they are being chased by a cloud of bees. Tottenham may be disappointing and destined to finish seventh, but they will still finish a disappointing seventh in the wildest way possible.
This feels significant because the Premier League has recently gone through a dull period. Quite a bit of the last two seasons involved staring at one end of the pitch as a tensely nimble goalkeeper performed a series of Cruyff pirouettes and flips as bait for some wary opposition presses.
And before that an increasingly boring formula: centre-backs recast as playmakers, wings turned into press machines, attacks that feel like they’ve been constructed via a 12-step Ikea brochure. Losing to Manchester City was like being very slowly killed with a pair of knitting needles.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Boredom is a vital key note in football. And it’s certainly been more boring than that in the past. I remember watching the Wimbledon game at Selhurst Park on one of those days when it’s so cold the air hurts when the whole game was actually Wimbledon goalkeeper Paul Heald stopping, playing with the bottom of his tracksuit, looking overwhelmed , then took a 17-pitch run and smashing the ball downfield with astonishing force, his boot making an incredible smacking noise every way, like a wet fish being hit against the wall of the dock.
This was just before football became a real pastime, the early era of the Premier League of handsome rascals in big shirts and shiny, flowing hair. The game reinvents itself even when it appears to be rigged. The current excitement is about something that may or may not have a lasting effect. But there’s a new kind of energy around the place. And also a new type of favorite football player: the Impact Runner.
They are still largely unmarked as a collective type. Their appearance comes from a tactical problem caused by the way much stronger teams control the game. How do you attack or try to move effectively when your opponents have 63% possession? How do you fight being strangled by a well-built tall block? How do you overcome a pattern where long periods are spent defending as the last people walled up in a zombie shelter at the end of the pier?
Players who can carry the ball with speed and power seem to be one of the attempts to disrupt this. The closest metric to measure their impact is not the counter attack, but the more opaque “carry”. There isn’t even a name for this kind of player yet. The Fire Ship. The siege engine. The adapter. The Thigh-Bulge Ball-Hog Run Man. But they help create exciting patterns and also showcase some really good players on otherwise struggling teams.
Wolves can be full of bugs. Gary O’Neill can always look like he just learned he lost the dog in a grueling 10-year divorce hearing. But the good times this season have still shown what a brilliant player on the ball Mateusz Cunha is, among the best carriers in the league alongside Anthony Elanga, Liam Delap, Adama Traore, Tyler Dibling and Kevin Schade.
Some of these are wings running from deep, often in a way that is not designed to receive a cross but to move the entire line of play up like rugby league players making contact. And once you start looking, you notice that there are young players emerging at the highest level with truly unusual qualities.
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You probably need to see Delap in the visceral, bending flesh to appreciate how exciting he is, a 21-year-old in a winless team who is still allowed to take risks to apply his ability to raises . The same goes for Diebling, a really good young footballer whose style of carrying the ball is something of a football parkour, jumping over posts, swinging between car bonnets, flying a trolley over a group of community support workers.
It’s tempting to wonder how players like this will adapt to being drafted into stronger teams. Counter-attacking and running power made them a star. Now go and do it in a team that spends its entire existence trying to punch tiny holes in a wall of flesh 20 yards from the target.
But there are ball carriers higher up the league. That’s another fun thing about this game model. It is linked, as everything should be now, to the current agonies of Manchester City. It was tempting to see cultural decline, end times, and the death of an era in this series of defeats, because all of those things are narratively appealing.
Maybe it’s tactical too. Managers have noticed that City are vulnerable to the ball being carried through midfield. All the teams they have played against have this capacity. The hesitation started with the 3-2 win against Fulhamwhen Traore realized he could just shoot around the pitch, randomly traumatizing everything in his path. Deyan Kulusevski went through City in Spurs’ 4-0 win. Ryan Gravenberch was extremely impressive last weekendand later Darwin Nunes gave Ruben Diaz a terrible time, snarling at his back, stamping his hooves, getting up on his hind legs.
That probably won’t save too many teams further down the league. But it’s undeniably exciting to watch, and also a reminder that there are always new shapes and new forms. The fear of football is always that it will wear out, that it will become a homogenized highly specific product, that we will just run out of the thing.
And yet somehow the elite game remains remarkably resilient. Thin it out, microanalyze every possible defensive throw combination. It will continue to draw you in, throwing out teenage dribble-machines, majestically rising South America, the rise of the hip-stirring Carry-Merchant.
