There’s a particular sort of football chat that does my head in, and it’s the one that starts with: “Yeah, but the league was poor.” Funny how it always arrives after a team has actually done the hard bit and finished first.
It’s not analysis, really. It’s often just a softer way of saying, “I don’t want to give them credit.” And in the Premier League, where every week tries to take points off you and the calendar never gives you a breather, that kind of sneering is usually more about the speaker than the champions.
Convenient arguments, deployed when it suits
Truth is, you can take that line and slap it onto plenty of seasons if you’re determined enough. Any year where the top sides aren’t all simultaneously hitting 90-plus points, someone will call it “weak”. Any year where there’s a runaway, someone will say “nobody pushed them”. Any year where a surprise package emerges, they’ll claim the usual big beasts simply “let it happen”.
Yet you rarely hear it used consistently. When it’s a rival’s title, the story becomes about everyone else failing. When it’s their own, suddenly it’s “mentality”, “standards”, “relentless”, all the buzzwords. That tells you everything you need to know.
A title is a title because of the grind
The league is the one competition you can’t blag. It’s 38 games of staying sane, staying sharp, and not collapsing when you hit the inevitable sticky spell. You have to manage injuries, dips in form, the awful away days where nothing works, and the pressure that builds because the table is there every single morning.
If others drop points, that’s not a crime. It’s the whole point of a league. You take what’s offered, and you still have to keep taking it for months. That’s not “lucky”, it’s how football works.
Criticise what you want, but don’t rewrite reality
And here’s the bit a lot of people struggle with: you can criticise a manager, performances, recruitment, whatever it is, without trying to scrub away the achievement when it lands. It’s not either-or. You can say, “I don’t like what I’m seeing,” while also admitting that winning the league is the hardest thing going domestically.
So if we’re talking Liverpool, or anyone else, let’s be grown up about it. Credit the winners. Then have your arguments about what needs improving. Denigrating people’s achievements is just noise, and it’s usually coming from places that aren’t used to enjoying any.
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