The most popular soccer league in the world began its season on Saturday, and along with the excitement and exhilaration about the games themselves — not to mention the sheer wonderment over the eye-crossing suit that the golfer Rory McIlroy chose to wear while parading his British Open trophy around Old Trafford in Manchester — there was a fair bit of hand-wringing from many longtime observers of England’s Premier League.
The concerns were twofold. First, with another transfer period nearing its conclusion, the shifting of the game’s truly elite stars away from England appears to have continued. Now that Luis Suárez will be attacking defenses in Spain — but not feasting on them, presumably — it is not a stretch to posit that none of the top 10 players in the world are currently playing in England.
That is compounded by the fact that there are also not a lot of English players playing in England’s top level (or at least playing very much). With foreign players omnipresent at many clubs (Manchester City had a starting lineup of all foreigners in the Community Shield last week), another round of concern over the paucity of English players getting regular minutes has cropped up. Last season, only about 30 percent of starters in the Premier League were eligible to play for England’s national team. Snarky fans, who surely watched England stumble in this summer’s World Cup, are often quick to point out that these two concerns — that is, a lack of the best players and a lack of English players — are not connected.
Nonetheless, there can be no disputing that one thing the Premier League does have plenty of is drama surrounding its managers. Part of this is cultural: Unlike athletes in American sports, players in England (and most other countries in Europe) do not face much accountability to the news media and fans during the season. There are no hard questions for players to answer after games, and there are few public explanations given when a player has made a costly mistake. The managers, in many ways, are the only ones with a voice. And most do not hesitate to speak.
Consider what has happened in just the first week.
José Mourinho, Chelsea’s manager, who brands himself the Special One, began the season by pointing out that other coaches in the Premier League did not face the same pressure to succeed that he did. In Mourinho’s opinion, other coaches “have 10 years to win something; I have only two.” That seemed to be a not-so-veiled shot at Arsenal Manager Arsène Wenger, who last won the Premier League title in 2004, and whom Mourinho previously described as a “specialist in failure.”
Wenger, for his part, was displeased that his team was playing at all. With the World Cup final having been played on July 13, Wenger said, the Premier League’s opening day was at least a week too early. Mesut Ozil, Per Mertesacker and Lukas Podolski, who all played for the World Cup champion, Germany, did not play for Arsenal on Saturday as the Gunners beat Crystal Palace, 2-1.
“Let’s not forget that the guy who goes to the World Cup final plays seven games,” Wenger said. “They need a breather.”
Up in northern England, Louis van Gaal wasted no time getting involved in the Premier League managers’ showcase. Van Gaal, who left his job as manager of the Netherlands’ national team to take over at Manchester United, seems well aware that Alex Ferguson left a strong history of colorful leadership — one that the dullish David Moyes could not fill — and van Gaal has not hesitated to embrace it.
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