As Stoke City and Everton fans gaze at each other from opposing sides of the Bet365 Stadium on Saturday, recognising the shared sense of disillusionment and disappointment in their eyes as they watch a largely attritional game neither manager can really afford to lose, there will be an inevitable sense of collective bemusement at the Potteries, wondering when, where, why and how it all went quite so wrong.
If this Premier League season is to be remembered for anything aside from Manchester City’s relentlessly immaculate form, something Stoke themselves experienced on Monday night, it will be the collapse of the division’s middle order, the traditional hierarchy we’ve come to expect from the top flight in recent years that has regularly regularly ensured entertaining football.
Everton and Stoke have been amongst the most consistent members of that, both finishing between 13th and 5th during the last five campaigns. But the latter will surely finish outside that bracket this season and the former, customarily the best of the rest outside of the division’s top six, will feel fortunate to finish inside the top half at the end of what has been an endlessly turbulent and underwhelming campaign.
They aren’t the only mid-table regulars to have suffered this season, either; West Ham, Southampton and Crystal Palace all fit into the calibre of club we usually expect to be a fair distance away from the relegation zone and keeping an optimistic eye on the European spots. Currently, however, they’re ranked between 16th and 18th in the Premier League table, and that has been painfully symptomatic of this season in English football.
In many ways, it’s a consequence of collective bargaining and the subsequent equality that has made the Premier League so great over the last 25 years. The playing field from seventh-place downwards is so level that even those promoted from the Championship can commit to net spends of between £45million-£60million, as Brighton and Huddersfield have done this season, and thus the obvious financial draw of signing for Stoke or West Ham over the Seagulls is significantly lesser than it once was.
Couple that with the fact the Big Six are so far away from the rest of the division that they have suffered just four home defeats to non-Big Six members since the start of last term, and suddenly pretty much every club below sixth place is just one run of poor results away from being in the relegation battle. For clubs like Everton, Stoke, West Ham and Southampton, who have set their own standards far higher, that’s a real problem.
First of all, the gap between results and expectation forms a toxic weight that becomes the harder to bear the longer it goes on for. Secondly and equally damagingly, once those clubs find themselves in a real relegation fight, they discover they don’t quite have the personnel equipped and experienced enough to steer them through such a scenario, even if they do have the quality on paper. They try to play relegation candidates at their own game, and inevitably come up short.
That is why defensive football has become so widespread in the Premier League this season, the teams with traditionally greater focus on attacking play suddenly finding themselves behind the likes of Leicester, Brighton and Burnley – clubs whose seasons have been built upon solidity at the back rather than flair at the other end.
Accordingly, traditional midtable chairmen have buckled under the pressure, and pretty much all of them have brought in managers to address defensive frailties – David Moyes, Roy Hodgson, Paul Lambert and Sam Allardyce.
Indeed, the appointment of the latter two make Saturday’s encounter particularly poignant, not least because they are the two members of the usual middle order that have placed the greatest emphasis on entertaining football in previous seasons.
Back in summer 2013, Everton hired one of the most offensive-minded managers in the league, Roberto Martinez, believing his adventurous philosophy would springboard the club into the Champions League; Stoke City, meanwhile, sacked the notoriously pragmatic Tony Pulis and tasked Mark Hughes with revolutionising the club’s style of football – a vanity project that saw them sign a trio as mercurial as they are technical in Bojan, Marko Arnautovic and Xherdan Shaqiri.
But five years on, that dream has categorically died. In 2013, Everton and Stoke could naturally assume midtable safety as a bare minimum and therefore afford to look further ahead, considering notions of footballing cultures and philosophies.
But the equality of the Premier League has created an almost dystopian manifestation of that phrase; nobody is quite safe anymore, and no teams can really afford the luxury of playing entertaining football – at least not over the course of an entire season. Even Eddie Howe’s Bournemouth have been forced to accept the practicalities of the relegation race at times this term.
Now, Stoke City find themselves drifting back towards a style of play that once compelled them to part with the most successful manager in their modern history, while Everton have handed the reins to a gaffer whose own ideals are the complete antithesis of what Martinez once tried to achieve. That transition encapsulates how drastically the dynamics of the Premier League have changed, and how it’s the clubs usually with the room to offer something more than clean sheet tactics that have felt the pinch most.
With Allardyce aware of how another poor result could lead to the early end of his short Everton tenure this summer and Lambert knowing that his side desperately need points to move out of the relegation zone, both managers will recognise there’s almost too much to lose on Saturday, and that’s how both boards have treated their seasons in general – forget ideas of fancy football and start picking up points by any means necessary, regardless of the direction the club were previously determined to take.
And in many ways, that’s why Stoke and Everton’s clash on Saturday will be such a telling and sad moment for the Premier League; the number of clubs with not just the finance but also the safety to promote positive football – a bracket both the Potters and the Toffees once belonged to – has become disastrously thin.
Perhaps the hierarchy will be restored next season, but right now the Premier League is almost too competitive for its own good; the confused middle order, stuck between long-term ambition and short-term security, is eating itself alive.
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