Manchester City are best of all time and nobody gives a f***; take note, Premier League

So they’ve won it again. It’s been very interesting to see the widespread indifference to Manchester City’s success this season and to read the Mailbox contributions about this undoubted phenomenon.

While there’s always moaning about dominant clubs, this has felt really different. The indifference isn’t – as some have suggested – jealousy or envy by fans of other clubs. It’s a genuine ‘not bothered.’

More than ever before there has felt little of the typical anger or bitterness at the big successful club, but a lot of meh. This team plays fantastic, brilliant football. When it comes to the art of kicking a ball around, this is as good as it gets. It should have everyone on their knees in supplication while purring loudly and obviously the broadcast media have done that; that’s their job. But for the rest of us, the indifference is real. It isn’t meant to be like this. Something else is going on.

It reveals something innate about football which goes against every principle the Premier League model has pushed for 30 years. Perfection isn’t really what we’re interested in. An excellent game doesn’t have to feature excellent football. There are 20 million attendances for lower-league football every season. They’re not doing that to punish themselves. There is something greater than the skills on show, something more important: soul.

I had the City v Madrid game on TV but became totally disengaged – it looked like an exhibition match – so instead I enjoyed Annan Athletic v Clyde and Boro v Coventry. This isn’t just me being ornery. City’s football was incredible but the other two were far better games. The Champions League semi-final doesn’t get a big audience on BT Sport as it is and when City are playing, there seems little point in watching because there’s no jeopardy, whereas both those other games were very competitive. You’ve got a team playing the best football of all time and a lot of folk don’t care. That should trouble a lot of football’s business people.

I’ve seen a lot of ‘football is broken’ comments provoked by another City win, but that’s only true at the highest level. Football is what it pretty much always has been at places like Annan Athletic. If you feel alienated by the Premier League and everything that comes with its amoral governance, just go down the pyramid to find community clubs which are not run as part of a long term sportswashing project, which aren’t there to cream money out of fans to further enrich directors and club owners and which aren’t carpet bombing an actual country.

The Premier League and the Champions League have, in effect, caused the sweeping indifference to City’s brilliance and they should be worried that it is the thin end of a very big wedge. Both have, over many years, slowly frozen the souls of many football fans and it is a frost that is slowly creeping across ever more of football’s elite real estate.

A City game just doesn’t feel like a game you want to invest your emotions in. It is too exploitative of us, it demands that we accept too much that is unacceptable. City are not unique in this and it is a condition that may not affect everyone, but it is a growing force. They are literally and emblematically what many feel is wrong with the elite modern game and those people can’t shake that feeling off by watching Kyle Walker out-run Vinícius Júnior anymore.

Yes, football is still thankfully a chaotic sport, capable of occasionally throwing a spanner in the spokes of well-oiled state-funded machines, but it happens less and less and will happen less and less. Those incidents allow the league and its supporters to pretend everything is fine. Look at how many times Leicester’s win has been used to ‘prove’ the league is some sort of meritocracy. And top-flight football is resilient enough to provide entertainment.

But when a club is playing exquisite football and a lot of people are simply yawning, this isn’t a healthy thing. It is a reaction to how this has been achieved, to the underlying politics of club and league.

And here’s the thing, indifference, probably more than outrage, is the true revolutionary reaction.

Anger is easy, awe is easy, both invest power in the subject, but indifference strips out power and isolates. What have you done? Oh, right. Sorry, not my thing.

Obviously City’s achievements are indelibly stained by their indefensible ownership and are not alone in that either. But City is too good. It is run too well and managed too well. That’s the problem. There is no jeopardy in their games and the neutral needs jeopardy to distract our minds from the ludicrous financial imbalances and the screams of the oppressed citizens of the owners’ country.

And there are a lot more neutrals than there are fans watching on TV. That should worry the Premier League. When it’s more exhibition than competition, many just get bored. It doesn’t matter how technically excellent the football on the pitch is, it isn’t good football in the broader context, not sportingly, nor commercially, nor even morally. The one with the most money wins is boring.

There absolutely is respect for these fantastic players and for how the manager has organised them to play fantastic football, game after game, but it doesn’t matter. When added into the soulless corporate culture of the big modern club and the infinite bloody money, what it achieves feels unfair and therefore completely hollow to many and that hollowness is expressed as indifference.

This indifference could be very damaging to the Premier League, which is already widely hated across Europe’s clubs for how it harvests so many good players via its financial dominance. If this all-conquering side can’t garner full respect or attention outside of the club fanbase, what does that say about the league that facilitated the financial model that allowed this dominance to happen?

After all, even those who do enjoy watching them have to add a human rights caveat to their praise. And what a thing to have to do that is. And again, this isn’t limited to City, as we know.

While it may be ambitious to think that the league’s executives are self-aware enough to realise that City’s dominance is staining their brand, if they do, now would be the right time to slap them down, to find them guilty and relegate them for financial irregularities, in order to stop them winning the league every season. It’d be very good for business.

And how interesting it would be to effect major change, not through protest, but through indifference about the best team this league has ever seen.

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