The Manchester City player Rúben Dias reminded football fans, if anyone needed reminding, why no one likes Abu Dhabi’s number one club. In his tiresome rant about how Southampton scraped a bore draw against his team yesterday, Dias totally lost his shit. Just look at this:
“It’s frustrating,” Dias said. “In a moment like this every point matters. And it is frustrating to play against a team like this.
“They don’t even try anything, they just sit and they don’t even want to win the game. They just want to be there. It is no good for the show and no good for themselves. It is no good for anyone but it is what it is. I don’t know how many times players went on the floor to try and waste time and waste time and waste time. It kills the rhythm of the game.”
Well, was Dias right and should already relegated Southampton “have a go” instead of sitting back to hang on for a point? Of course Dias isn’t right. The fault lies entirely with the Premier League itself.
Southampton earned their 12th point of the season in a league that has become woefully unbalanced in terms of wealth. Actually, maybe the top flight always woefully unbalanced, even before the Premier League. But this is not the only game this season that went this way. Almost every team outside the top six playing a team from the top six does something like this. Allow me to quote Southampton caretaker boss Simon Rusk:
“We did want to frustrate City,” Rusk said. “It’s a back-handed compliment [from Dias]. If we go toe-to-toe with City we lose. We’ve got a fifth of their budget. We have to find our way and that’s OK.”
Exactly. And frankly it shows Dias for what he is: a typically entitled multimillionaire footballer playing for a team, a club, that expects so-called lesser teams to just roll over for them. Presumably, he thinks that Southampton going down with all guns blazing and losing 7-0 would be “good for the show”?
I am biased anyway. I cannot abide anything about City. I dislike the ownership model, I dislike the way they have bought repeated success by employing arguably one of the world’s greatest coaches to guide them to success and I dislike the Premier League to allow, even enable, a situation whereby there is no real competition, apart from around the top six. You can argue that there have always been clubs with more money than others, and you’d be right, but when a tosspot like Dias whines about a club with a fifth of the budget of the team he plays for playing what some call “anti-football”, then what does he expect? Most games in which he plays will be similar because almost no one can compete with City’s riches.
Manchester City are a great example of how shit the Premier League actually is. They’ve had, by their standards, a terrible season, yet potentially they could still finish the season second in the Premier League and as FA Cup winners. That’s the kind of ‘failure’ most clubs dream of.
Next season, Southampton will be somewhere near the top of the Championship table, not least because of the gap between its top teams and its lower league teams is almost as great as that between Manchester City and Southampton. And City, doubtless boosted by hundreds of millions of pounds of new summer signings, will be at the top again, with Dias still complaining at who the little teams who try to avoid the hammering they would suffer if they came out to play.
The Premier League is over-hyped, everyone is overpaid, the football is greatly overrated and, sadly, it’s over here. And when teams like Southampton set out to spoil, as they did yesterday, don’t blame them. Blame the lop-sided league itself. Clubs like City bathe in riches, everyone else is just trying to survive. The best league in the world? My arse.
