Mark Langdon: Premier League risks boring the next generation

Veteran racing writer Mark Langdon fears English football is sleep-walking towards a generational cliff, warning that the Premier League’s drift toward cautious, set-piece dominated fare is already losing the battle for young attention spans.

Writing in his regular column, Langdon recalls how the Grand National once gripped every layer of society because “we just didn’t have the same distractions 35 years ago.” The Amstrad CPC 464 and basic sports titles like Paperboy were enough to keep a primary-school punter happy between races, he says, leaving space for the whole family to gather round the television for the Aintree spectacular.

Fast-forward to 2024 and the dynamic has flipped. “These days you need to make sure the quality is high just to stand a chance,” Langdon argues, “and that should be a warning for football, a sport that collectively assumes it is untouchable.”

He points to this week’s Champions League offerings from Arsenal and Liverpool as evidence, describing their mid-week performances as “some dull stuff” and contrasting the functional English style with the “fluid football of Bayern Munich and Paris Saint-Germain.” The columnist believes the TikTok generation “won’t tolerate it for too much longer.”

Yet the entertainment deficit is only half the problem. Langdon reserves his sharpest ire for the growing trend of goalkeepers feigning injury to gift coaches an unofficial time-out, an epidemic he witnessed first-hand during Crewe’s comfortable win over Salford on Monday. With reserve keepers barely bothering to warm up, he says, the ruse is insultingly obvious.

A simple fix is already on the WSL drawing board for next season: force the offending team to sacrifice an outfield player to the sideline for 60 seconds after the restart. “Problem solved,” Langdon writes, urging the men’s game to adopt the measure immediately.

Unless the Premier League tackles both its stylistic stagnation and the gamesmanship pandemic, Langdon concludes, the competition risks following horse racing into the category of sports the next generation simply tune out.