Premier League is designed to keep things interesting
Everything pointed to a terrible week of Premier League action. Liverpool was the only top six team with a game because the rest were either playing in the FA Cup or had their games rescheduled because of it. The bottom three were all in action, which is never a good sign when it comes to entertainment. And the league as a whole had its eye on the final international break of the season.
Despite the signs of anti-entertainment doom, the four games that were actually played on Saturday turned out to be interesting in their own unique ways, and that’s because every game matters in the Premier League, especially as the end of the season draws near.
God awful West Brom were 1-0 up and feeling the faintest glimmers of hope all the way up to the 77th minute of their game against Bournemouth. Then the Cherries pounced and ripped the Baggies’ hearts out by scoring two late goals, including an 89th-minute Junior Stanislas free-kick stunner.
Nineteenth-placed Stoke could relate to West Brom’s soul-crushing demise. Playing in snow globe-like conditions, Stoke recovered from an early Charlie Adam red card to even things up 1-1 in the 77th minute only for Everton to get a winner in the 84th.
Crystal Palace, meanwhile, earned their first win since they beat Southampton on Jan. 2, while Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah scored four during his team’s romping win over Watford.
Salah’s goals, Crystal Palace’s solid win, and Stoke and West Brom’s dual heartbreaks came about on a theoretically terrible Premier League weekend for a very simple reason: There are gigantic incentives for winning and huge penalties for losing that are equally applicable to players, managers and clubs.
The threat of relegation is the all-consuming fire that keeps teams like Palace, Stoke and West Brom fighting till their very last breath. They do so because going down — a fate bestowed upon the worst three teams in the league each season — can be a death sentence. Clubs with terrible ownership, like West Brom, are particularly screwed because the Premier League’s riches act like the oil in over revved car engine. When the money goes away, the engine seizes up and explodes. That’s what happened to Leeds, Sunderland, Blackburn Rover, Wigan and Portsmouth — formerly solid Premier League teams who have tumbled into lower league purgatory. The fear of falling into oblivion is why West Brom fired their old manager Tony Pulis in late November and hired Alan Pardew. The move hasn’t worked at all, but at least they tried.
Managers and players can suffer a similar fate because, particularly with players, their contracts often contain relegation clauses which automatically slash paychecks as teams tumble down the table. For the best players on relegated teams, this isn’t a problem. Premier League vultures will pick them off the rotting corpses of their relegated foes. But most players are not so lucky and some are particularly hurt by relegation. Take Sunderland’s Jack Rodwell. Once spoken of as the future of England’s national team, the midfielder is now stuck at Sunderland because he’s got a gigantic paycheck, by Championship standards, and is constantly injured which means that nobody’s willing to take a flier on him. At 27-years-old, his career is effectively over thanks to relegation.
While there is no chance that relegation will cross the pond, US sports leagues should take a general lesson from soccer’s setup. Incentivizing losing, by, for example, awarding draft picks to the worst teams, drains the competitiveness — and entertainment — out of sports. That’s what’s happened to the NBA, where one-third of the league is tanking, and MLB, where teams are replicating the Cubs and Astros’ strategy of losing lots of games in the short term in order to build a long-term winner. Soccer fans don’t have to endure such indignities because there is no reason whatsoever to lose. Winning is all that matters.
Goals of the Week
Mohamed Salah, Liverpool 5-0 Watford
Mohamed Salah scores great solo dribbling goals. He scores great team goals and great poacher’s goals. He’s a great goal scorer and scorer of great goals. All of which can be seen in his performance against Watford.
Red Card of the Week
Charlie Adam, Stoke 1-2 Everton
It was hard to see what happened because it was literally hard to see. Snow was the name of the game between Stoke and Everton on Saturday as the white stuff poured down from the sky in intermittent deluges between moments of sunshine. Unfortunately for Charlie Adam, he launched into a tackle on Wayne Rooney when the snowfall was at its most severe. If the snow hadn’t been there he might have been a split second faster and gotten all ball, but as it was, Adam got no ball and all Rooney’s leg. It was enough to earn Adam a straight red. On another day, it might not have even been a foul.