Premier league

Arsenal’s triumph in finally winning the Premier League again after 22 long, often eyeball-wrenchingly tortuous years has gone down like a Keir Starmer motivational ‘I’m not leaving!’ speech, which is ironic given the Prime Minister is an avid Gooner like me. It’s hard to understand why a club that boasts a fanbase including us, Jeremy Corbyn, Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame, the late Osama bin Laden and Prince Harry (whose matchday allegiance has followed a similar path to his royal duties, in that he never turns up) attracts such opprobrium that we were recently named the ‘most-hated supporters’ in the league. But as with Millwall in their hooligan heyday, if no one likes us, we don’t care.

The footballer Dele Alli was applauded recently after he spoke of his sleeping pill abuse. ‘It’s a problem not only I have. It’s going around more than people realise in football,’ he said during a filmed interview with Manchester United’s former captain Gary Neville. It’s not the first time we’ve heard this. Footballers are ‘taking too many sleeping tablets and painkillers’ and addiction is becoming a ‘big issue’, former pro Ryan Cresswell warned last year. (He said his own addiction left him ‘gripping on for dear life’.) He claimed the problem is affecting stars at the very top level: ‘For me, it started with one after every game… to one a day to two a day and then I knew I was addicted.

It is late in the evening. You’re in a bar. You’ve had quite a bit to drink but you are conversing with the fragrant young lady you found hanging around in there. You find her quite attractive and are possibly keen for things to proceed. What should you say to her, to speed things along? Wayne Rooney’s contribution is unbeat-able: ‘Are those tits real?’ That’s certainly the gambit I would go with if I ever find myself in a similar situation with, say, Princess Michael of Kent or Shami Chakrabarti. Wayne said it to ‘party girl’ Laura Simpson shortly before he got charged with drink-driving. Now he’s in trouble with the police and his wife, Coleen. I don’t think Coleen is too bothered about the driving charge.

Football’s back, I’m afraid, and, in the imperishable words of David Mitchell, every kick in every game matters to someone, somewhere. Still, it’s the Premier League’s 25th anniversary, so a good time to take stock. There’s no doubt that with Sky’s help the PL has sexed up the English game and moved it once and for all from being the preserve of the working man. When I started going to matches half a century or so ago, the stadiums were awful, the food terrible, and the football not that great. A game could be intimidating; not for the fainthearted, or women, or people who weren’t white. Now that has changed out of all recognition, almost entirely for the better.

Some years ago, when Millwall played West Ham United, the Millwall fans sang the following song (to the tune of ‘When The Saints Go Marching In’, if you want to hum along): ‘Oh east London, is like Bengal. Oh east London is like Bengal. It’s like the back streets of Delhi. Oh east -London is like Bengal.’ They haven’t sung it for two or three years, but only because Millwall haven’t played West Ham. I mean, I don’t think that Millwall’s supporters have gradually thought better of it and decided that the ditty was perhaps racist and demeaning, or are worried about the relative geography of Delhi and Bengal. If we (Millwall are my team) played West Ham tomorrow, I think we’d still sing it.

Perfection in sport: unattainable, but sometimes you can come close. Moments, people, actions you never tire of watching: Roger Federer’s backhand; Virat Kohli’s cover drive; Mo Farah’s acceleration off the final bend or little Lionel Messi dribbling through a crowded penalty area as if his opponents were shadows; Fred Couples’s sensuous golf swing. Last weekend another moment: the long pass from England’s Owen Farrell to Elliot Daly for that decisive try in the final minutes at the Principality Stadium. This 25ft rocket, superbly timed and delayed long enough for Farrell to be in touching distance of the defensive battery, was so quick and flat it left the defence flummoxed.

For football fans, today is a special day: it's Transfer Deadline Day – a branded, almost to Hallmark levels, moniker. It's a day of bathos and unfulfilment. Your club will miss out on a top target, sign some underwhelming alternative, and clog up social media with pictures of them holding a shirt in a car park. Transfer Deadline Day is the great dance of performative capitalism for the working classes. We call it a ‘window’ because it is supposed to be a ‘window of opportunity’ for clubs and fans, but there is also a voyeuristic element. We spend the summer hidden in the bushes, watching the attractive Athletico Madrid winger or Bayer Leverkusen centre-half preening in front of the mirror.

With parliament in recess, silly season is in full swing. In fact, silly season would be an apt name for the transitional period between the dying days of the previous Premier League season, and the Bacchanalia that greets the opening weekend of the next one. Football’s silly season is a time when Slovenian journalists can sentence Jose Mourinho to three years in jail, when Wales can become (arguably) the third best team in Europe, and when Manchester United can decide that a player – any player – is worth €100 million. That last, silliest of silly season traditions, is the essential contradiction that greets the start of a new season. The return of football has a quotidian significance, like the re-rising of the sun every morning.

[audioplayer src="http://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/262486539-the-spectator-podcast-erdogans-europe.mp3" title="Roger Alton and Nick Hilton discuss Leicester's title win" startat=1063] Listen [/audioplayer] Jean-Philippe Toussaint, in his recent book Football, observes that the sport is ‘measured and appreciated’ in the imagination. Toussaint, an intellectually fanatical supporter of the Belgian national team, is used to failure. Indeed, he is an acolyte of the view that football support is built on failure. After all, aren’t the grown men and women on the terraces of English stadia simply not good enough for a place on the pitch?

It’s one of the oldest stories of them all, deeply embedded in our nature and our culture. In some ways it’s the story that defines our humanity and we have told it a thousand times in a thousand different ways. It’s in the Bible with Joseph and his coat of many colours, it’s King Arthur pulling the sword from the stone, it’s the ugly duckling,Cinderella, Great Expectations, Moll Flanders and Jane Eyre. It’s Clark Kent becoming Superman, it’s Harry Potter leaving the cupboard under the stairs to become the greatest wizard of them all. It’s Rags to Riches. And it’s the tale of Leicester City. Sport retells all our most ancient and archetype-crammed stories and does so again and again, providing us with a living mythology.