Feel the noise
As Manchester City attempt to win their fifth Premier League title on the trot, Simon Barnes says millions of people around the world will be watching – and listening to the unique soundtrack of stadiums packed with British football fans in full flow
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- Simon Barnes
Why bother? Everybody knows Manchester City are going to win the Premier League. They’ve won in six of the past seven years, so who’s going to waste time watching it? Answer: most of the world. The Premier League is still the most popular league on the planet. No one else is even close.
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The average global audience for a live Premier League match is 643 million. The nearest rival is La Liga in Spain with 76 million. In third place is Ligue 1 in France with 10.5 million. Germany’s Bundesliga got six million after Covid. Serie A in Italy and Major League Soccer in the US get two million apiece. Popularity brings money, and Premier League clubs have access to plenty of the stuff. So is that what it’s really all about?
Answer: not really. Take Manchester United. They’ve spent 11 seasons since Sir Alex Ferguson retired as manager proving that money and success aren’t inevitable partners. Last season they finished eighth. They paid £82 million for the Brazilian winger Antony in 2022, but in two seasons he’s scored five Premier League goals.
Chelsea, too, have proved that spending and success aren’t blood brothers. Todd Boehly bought the club in 2022 and has assembled a squad by spending a billion pounds. In the past two seasons they finished 12th and sixth.
All this money producing less than impressive results gives a refreshing flavour to the Premier League. These two clubs have given us an intriguing subplot about pride and falls and humility, and a proper perspective on the clubs that succeed. The winning clubs have money, but they have something else as well.
Manchester City set the standard. Their manager, Pep Guardiola, is on a mad mission to create perfection. Belgian midfielder Kevin De Bruyne – who’s perhaps beginning to fade as a major force – has been the player who has done most to put these ideals into action.
Guardiola knows as well as anybody that footballing perfection is an impossible dream. But that gives him all the more reason to chase it, and this pursuit has been weirdly compelling. He has a passion for passionless excellence, and that contradiction has created something for everybody else to both admire and seek to destroy.
City’s brilliance hasn’t killed off the competition. On the contrary, the chasing clubs improve season by season, removing any possibility of complacency at the top. Whatever City win, they increasingly have to struggle for. Last season Arsenal finished just two points behind them. They did so by playing youthful, joyous football that made even aged spectators long to play again. One glimpse of Bukayo Saka romping down the wing is enough to convince anybody that football at its heart is all about fun. Unless you’re the opposing full-back, of course.
Can Arsenal go one better this season? Getty
Liverpool under Jürgen Klopp were City’s most regular pursuers, opposing City’s coolness with their heat. It was a series of wonderful battles, but perhaps Klopp shouldn’t have run last season as a personal farewell tour because it led to a marked drop in intensity and they finished a distant third. Now Liverpool are being remodelled under Arne Slot, and football has an intriguing new narrative.
The Premier League remains highly competitive. The hierarchy isn’t set in stone, as Leicester City proved in 2016. Their ghost continues to haunt the league, giving hope to middle-rankers. They showed that the Premier League can indeed be won by an outsider. It probably won’t happen again this season, but it might. Leicester are back in the Premier League after a brief visit to the Championship.
Bubbling under the elite there are the nearly clubs. Aston Villa were promoted in 2019, had three double-figure finishes and then finished seventh and, last year, fourth. And then there is the perpetual hope that Tottenham Hotspur, fifth last season, will somehow stop being Spursy and add steel to their intermittent brilliance.
It’s a rich mix and it goes a good way to explaining why the Premier League remains so far ahead of all the other leagues in the world. The habit, the soap opera, the resonant names; all these help to build an experience that annually enthrals the world from August to May.
Whatever City win, they increasingly have to struggle for
But there’s an additional factor less often discussed: the soundtrack. True, all clubs, big and small, have supporters and they all make plenty of noise. Unfettered emotion is part of the global experience of football, but British fans are better at expressing it.
It’s not that they’re more passionate or more committed or more noisy. It’s just that the tradition here adds to the viewer experience in a way the other leagues can’t rival. They often have cheerleaders with microphones and/or amplified drumbeats. Even if they don’t, there’s a different quality to the sound from the stands.
When British fans cheer, they reflect, reinforce and enhance the emotional experience of football. They sing, they shout and they express glory, joy, humour, fury, disappointment and hatred. It’s exactly what the best composers of film scores do. John Williams, Ennio Morricone, Hans Zimmer: they produce scores that emphasise the action and bring out the emotion. What would films be without Williams when Superman takes flight, Morricone when Clint rides into town, or Zimmer as Captain Jack Sparrow steps onto the quay?
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Premier League crowds express the shifting emotions of a match as no other league does. Their wild din – and sometimes their intense silence – is what makes the Premier League work and draws audiences across the world. But it comes with an awful warning to all the top Premier League clubs: price the din-makers out of the game and you lose the soundtrack. Lose the soundtrack and you lose the world.
Authors
Simon BarnesAuthor and journalist
Simon Barnes is a sports and wildlife writer, and is the author of a number of books including the recently published The Green Planet
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