The broken dream
Reaching the Premier League is everything; until you get there
The Premier League. The promise land. The best league in the world. The dream.
For the 72 football league clubs in English football, there is one goal; the Premier League. Clubs fight it out season after season, each striving to get promoted to the promise land.
But what about when you actually achieve that dream? When you actually get promoted to the Premier League? The reality for many is stark.
I know that too well. As a Cardiff City fan, I’ve now seen my club play in the Premier League twice; first in 2013 with Malky Mackay as manager and now in 2018 under Neil Warnock.
In May, when promotion was sealed with a 0–0 draw with Reading on the final day of the season, we as a fan-base were in euphoria. We’d done it.
Not only had we done it, we’d done it in our traditional colours of blue. Editor’s note: Cardiff City owner changed the colours of the club in 2012 to red, before reverting back to blue in 2015.
Fast forward five months and the feeling around the club is remarkably different. While the majority know that we shouldn’t even be in the Premier League with the quality (or lack of) in our squad, some fans are already calling for Warnock’s head.
Why? Well, Cardiff have failed to win a game so far this season. Seven games in, zero wins, two draws and five loses. We’ve got a goal difference of -12 and it doesn’t look like we’ll be picking up a point any time soon.
It’s hard to enjoy the Premier League — even Neil Warnock agrees.
“I don’t enjoy it like the Championship, everybody knows that.”
It’s certainly hard to blame Warnock. In his three previous spells as a Premier League manager, Warnock has never survived, being sacked twice (QPR and Crystal Palace) and relegated the other (Sheffield United).
Perhaps Warnock, more than others, knows that the Premier League dream is a broken one.
It’s a hard adjustment to make. The club, players and fans must adjust from winning the majority of your games, to losing almost all.
Mentally, that’s a tough shift.
This rings true for Cardiff more than others. After seven games last season, the club had won five, drawn one and lost one. This season, they’re without a win.
It works both ways. No honest fan of a club relegated from the Premier League to the Championship will argue that they’re finding the Championship less fun. Watching your side be competitive, scoring goals and chasing promotion once again is what we all strive for as fans.
Regardless of money, TV rights and all those distractions, football is, and always will be, about entertainment. That’s something the Premier League has lost for all but six of it’s teams.
So, while commercially the Premier League is a dream, for so many that dream is broken once they achieve it.
