If every win is going to be painful from here, you may as well just take the painful wins – welcome to Arsenal’s late title stagger
On Thursday night at a swanky London hotel so luxuriously risk‑averse the toilets are equipped with wireless thermostats to control to within half a degree the heat of the seat, the Premier League chief executive, Richard Masters, spoke in detail for the first time about the prospect of “Premflix”, the direct‑to‑consumer model of the future, an app that will sluice this irresistible footballing opiate directly into the eyeballs of 8 billion rapt humans.
In doing so Masters was echoing the words of Todd Boehly on the same stage 12 months earlier, who had talked about the Premier League as a kind of fire stolen from the gods, source of the next great tech platform, an engine of empire, tool of world domination, of lassoing the moon out of the sky.
Well. OK. But perhaps not quite like this. Unless, that is, the world really likes hugging, set pieces and deflections. In which case: activate launch sequence. We are go.
Three‑quarters of the way through an afternoon that resembled for much of the time one of those 300-year-old Derbyshire wrestle-ball events where 2,000 tattooed men hug each other in a village high street, a thought occurred. What do you do when you only look like scoring from corners, but your attack is so blunt it can’t actually win you any corners?
