EPL Monday: Goodbye to the 2014-15 Season ... You Won't Be Missed

The final EPL Monday of the season falls on a Tuesday, go figure …

With apologies to James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem … English Premier League, I love you but you’re bringing me down. Or, alternately, to borrow a line from The Simpsons, the 2014-15 EPL season is over … let us never speak of it again.

The season came to a close on Sunday with zero surprises(*).

Chelsea sent off Didier Drogba to soccer Valhalla and celebrated its successful league triumph with more selfies than a vapid cable reality show. Hull City fell down the trapdoor with Burnley and QPR in the Championship. Manchester City, Arsenal and Manchester United rounded out the top four — again. It all went almost according to plan, as foreseen in August. Perhaps the only result that went off book was Southampton placing seventh following the mass summer 2014 exodus and — if you want to strain — Louis van Gaal steering the United ship back onto its proper course.

Exciting, right? We almost had a title race for, let’s think, maaaaaybe two weeks? Three if we’re pushing it. Arsenal fans gnashed their teeth after each and every setback, yet still finished in the Champions League places once again — crazy. Tottenham continued to do Tottenham things. Liverpool said goodbye to Steven Gerrard … and a season everyone at Anfield would just as soon forgot.

And too bad Chaucer isn’t around to write an epic poem about this season’s relegation scrap, right?

Thankfully, the marathon 38 games season which began in August, weeks after the World Cup final, is over and done with. Watching from afar it often felt like contrived narratives, conspiracy theories, transfer sagas, endlessly second-guessing the officials and other tedious, non-soccer stuff tended to overshadow everything else. Perhaps this is inevitable since the Premier League only plays once a week (most times), so in order to keep the unrelenting hype machine running, manufactured nonsense needs to happen — a page right out of the NFL/ESPN playbook.

The EPL is most-watched, most-hyped, most-buzzy league on planet earth. There is a strange, unending appeal that makes us wake up early on Saturdays and Sundays for this madness — if only for fleeting moment of brilliance. The EPL is popular, it has money from global television deals, players see it as an ultimate destination outside a handful of powerful continental European clubs and yet … it seems like it’s getting disjointed, if not worse on the field itself.

Clubs spent nearly a billion dollars in the summer on transfers to … remain mediocre? It’s easy to point to high-end acquisitions like the $90 million Manchester United paid Real Madrid for Angel Di Maria but what about Hull City netting $40 million in losses on players only to get relegated? West Ham netted a loss of $45 million in the summer only to end up finishing 12th. To borrow another line from The Simpsons, a Premier League club with money is often the mule with a spinning wheel — “No one knows how he got it, and danged if he knows how to use it!”

Logically, why are teams spending untold millions only to get marginally better … if that? Granted the unofficial glass ceiling on the Premier League means anyone outside the Chelsea/Arsenal/Manchester City/Manchester United quartet struggles to climb the table. As cynical as it looks, perhaps Mike Ashley’s plan of putting the bare minimum into Newcastle United to make sure the Magpies finish above the bottom three isn’t too crazy. In the end how much of difference is it between finishing 8th or 16th? (If you’re a supporter buying season tickets, obviously you’ll look at it different.)

EPL clubs finished 1-6 in the knockout stages of the Champions League and Europa League — the only victory coming by Everton in the Europa League Round of 16. Fittingly the EPL is now close to losing its fourth Champions League berth. This is cyclical. It wasn’t very long ago (2007-08) the competitions final four consisted of Manchester United, Chelsea and Liverpool.

Maybe I’m crazy and the exception to the rule. The EPL continues to be wildly popular. Kids in America are increasingly as likely to wear a Chelsea or Arsenal jersey as one from the NBA or NFL. The next television contract in the United States will be hotly contested among ESPN, NBC, Fox and others. Let’s hope NBC retains the rights because it’s coverage — making each and every match available — might be the best thing about the league in 2014-15.

Even so, the more you watch the EPL, the more the warts pop up and become harder to ignore. After 10 months and 38 games it’s often hard to decide if the EPL is all sizzle and no steak.

(*) Cynicism aside, Jonas Gutierrez scoring for Newcastle to clinch the game vs. West Ham and safety did give me goosebumps for another a minute

[Photo via Getty]