Premier League: The Two Halves

Over two weekends of football, there have already been four 6-0 results with a different team on the receiving end each time. Though this is great news for Chelsea, Arsenal and even Newcastle fans, the teams on the receiving end may begin to feel a great sense of injustice, and this could end up being bad news for the Premier League.

The Newcastle-Aston Villa result aside—which even Toon fans can admit is a freak result—Chelsea and Arsenal have both ripped through relatively small teams in the opening two weekends of the season. Blackpool, Wigan and West Bromwich Albion have been on the receiving end of these results (I refrain from using words such as pasting, demolition, destruction, humiliation, or spanking out of respect, you understand).

These teams have a considerably smaller budget than the likes of Arsenal and Chelsea not just in a monetary sense, but also with regards to resources, and this is where the top teams in the league have an advantage.

Money, of course, plays a huge part and can certainly help in many ways, but it is the back room staff and the resources the players have available to them that gives them the edge on the pitch. With the exception of Manchester City, the top teams in the division have been building their starting lineup for years and will only add a few players per close season, and so an initial transfer budget is not the issue.

For the smaller clubs, the problem is consistency and this is highlighted best at Wigan, who have a high turnover of players. This causes them to struggle to build a squad and prefer to build a team—a small, but important difference.

The same is true of the newly promoted clubs such as West Brom and Blackpool who will have bought in five or six new players over the summer in an attempt to play with substance over style and have enough experienced players on the books to survive.

This rarely works.

The clubs who regularly stay in the Premier League but bounce around the late teens come May will often produce or come across a few Premier League quality players who are then snapped up by a bigger club for an obscene amount of money. Think Antonio Valencia (Wigan to Manchester United), Yossi Benayoun (West Ham to Liverpool/Chelsea), Carlos Tevez (West Ham to Manchester United/City), Javier Mascherano (West Ham to Liverpool), Adam Johnson (Middlesborough to Manchester City). The list goes on.

With the money the smaller clubs will make from this, a number of average players with a mix of youth and experience will be purchased in a bid to wipe the fans' memories of the star that got away. However, these teams will realise that you cannot replace quality with quantity.

Just because a team buys three thirty-something strikers who have 40 Premier League goals each does not mean you will get 120 goals out of them.

This mixture of naivety from smaller clubs and the money available to larger clubs as well as a healthy section of scouts is leading the Premier League down the wrong road. At the rate it is going, there will soon be a top section of eight or nine clubs and a bottom section of the other 11 and these clubs will be separated by 30-40 points. The only interesting games will come between the "big nine" and the others will be foregone conclusions.

There is no simple way to sort this out. Ideas have been mentioned such as wage cap or transfer limitations, but as previously mentioned, the resources already in place are the problem. The logical answer would be a system similar to the draft transfer system in American sports. This would allow smaller teams to trade rather than buy and sell, and so quality players would be replaced by quality players. However this system may be coming 15 years too late to be viable in the Premier League.

The future of English football is hazy at best, with a number of problems needing to be addressed, but with many more results like the 6-0s we have witnessed so far, we could have a seven-way relegation battle.