The Barclays Premier League 2015/16™

For the final time, in association with the world’s favourite bank, we go again.

It’s hard to believe that this time next year, the reassuring Barclays branding will no longer adorn the title name of the world’s favourite league. And as a result the football family is currently experiencing a similar feeling to that of seeing a much loved, terminally ill family member live out their final months. Making the most of the time we have left together, cherishing every second.

Barclays have a long and storied association with our domestic football, starting in 1987 when they began sponsoring the old Football League at a time when football was at its lowest point. Football people will never forget that gesture.

Their association with top flight football may have ended for the first time in 1992 with the formation of the Premier League, but they showed their true commitment to our game by continuing to sponsor the remaining three divisions of the Football League for another season.

We welcomed them back to what was then named “The Premiership” in 2001 under the Barclaycard brand, before the wider Barclays name resumed its association with top flight football in 2004. Then in 2007 the FA Barclays Premiership became the Barclays Premier League™, the name that we, Owen Coyle and everybody else in football has come to know and love so much.

Players, managers, backroom staff, supporters and media are all aware of the special significance of this campaign.

We owe it to Barclays to make their final season the best season ever and send them out in glorious style.

Let’s do it for Barclays.

Good luck to all stakeholders.

2 Likes

Interest I’ve taken in the off-season proceedings: Virtually none.

Amount I’ve missed the Barclays Premier League™ during the off-season: not at all.

And it seems others feel the same.

This is worrying.

We need to support this thing. A bit like the early Superbowls, it might not survive if the public don’t get behind it.

2 Likes

That’s quite similar to how romance has been ruined in fundamentalist Islamic societies, and Utah, due to men stockpiling female talent in the one polygamous marriage.

My interest has seriously declined over the last 3 years- The sport in general no longer interests me as a spectacle… SKY have certainly played a part here, with their safe, boring, mundane coverage - but hey, they have a product to protect… This filters into the players then - the money from sky has meant that most footballers are way over paid, and i’m not on about top, top players, but the younger lads who’ve done fuck all in their career and probably never have to with the money they can now get. However, the prancing, diving and feigning injury really boils my goat - it’s sickening watching grown men, earning such huge salaries to go out and perform, roll around the ground with no shame at all…pre- 2012 I would never have missed a Liverpool game or a round of champions league … I couldn’t give a fuck if I see either now. I didn’t watch a full game from last year’s CL and missed half of Liverpool’s game… what have we Irish come to at all when we give up on our sporting heroes ?? I think our heroes have given up on us tho…

Also - the whole Irish lads calling each other mancs, scousers, gooners etc. etc and fighting about English PLCs also gets on my blood. Wankers.

Our year. YNWA.

1 Like

It’s difficult to even watch it as a casual observer to be honest. It’s a bit football-hipstery to say it but at least there’s a more level playing field in the Championship for example. The Spanish and German leagues suffer from having dominant superpowers but they have superstar players on superstar wages and the rest of the teams have good players on good wages. English clubs just don’t seem capable of differentiating between average and top players and they pay premiums for mediocre commodities. When that commodity is English then they pay absurd premiums.

I guess none of that should really matter when you’re watching it casually but it does. It makes me far less likely to read any article about any English club or any injury crisis or any minor incident blown out of all proportion. A good highlights package for another league at a prime time Saturday slot and I’d probably hardly ever bother with the league again.

3 Likes

Where are our Ruby Walshs, the Henry Shefflins, the Colm Coopers, the Padraig Harringtons?

3 Likes

You should never not watch a match
Declan Lynch
The Premier League is back next week and we give thanks for the end of the hell that is summer

Though he would not be a man for the organised religion - he would be more the “spiritual” sort - so extreme was his emotion he seemed to have connected with the old-fashioned idea of a single deity which controls all things for good or ill.

In this case, the “ill” was the lack of top action from the Barclays Premier League during the summer, and the “good” is the return of that top action next weekend. God - or God as this desperate man understands him - is good.

But we have been tested, by this unusually long summer, with no World Cup or European Championship, just the Copa America which was held in Chile, thus challenging us with its absurd local custom of starting the matches around midnight, Irish time, or even in the early hours of the morning, Irish time.
In future these South Americans must understand that our needs are more important than theirs, that Irish time is inherently better than Chilean time or Bolivian time or whatever, and they must organise their games accordingly - but that is an issue for another day.
So yes, we have been tested, as we attempted to survive on whatever sustenance that various other sports can offer us, like “listening to an orchestra which is missing the grand piano”, as they say.

Though in truth, in that mythical orchestra football is something more than the grand piano. It would also be the strings, maybe the woodwind too, a bit of the brass section perhaps…and yet there are some who cannot hear it at all, or who reject it.
It is now commonplace to hear them arguing that players are being paid ridiculous amounts of money, indeed it has become the standard measurement of extravagance in our culture - how often would we hear someone on a radio panel comparing the pay of nurses and fire-firefighters to these “millionaires kicking a pig’s bladder around a field?”
Though there is a certain truth buried deep in there. It is indeed ridiculous that these men who have risen to the high ground of the Premier League entirely on the basis of genuine talent, regardless of what school they went to, with no “pull” of any kind, should be seen as abnormally wealthy, reviled almost as much as hedge fund managers or special advisors to the government - indeed any society in which it has become routine to attack the pay and conditions of highly skilled professional footballers, is a society in trouble.

But still you can hear the cribbing. They say that the relatively weak performances of our teams in the Champions League in recent seasons - Liverpool in particular put up a poor show last year - has “proven” that the Premier League is not “the best league in the world”, that that is all hype.
But I have noted that on my television set there are many matches from the supposedly superior Spanish league, and the German league, on the same channels which bring us our top Premier League action. And yet the multitudes seem to prefer a competitive match between two English teams, rather than watching Barcelona sleepwalking through another exquisite five-goal crushing of Deportivo La Coruna.

Then we are told that the Champions League exposes the mediocrity of the Premier League, and yes I acknowledge that the Champions League can be more refined, more intensely brilliant - but I prefer to see it as essentially different in nature to the Premier League, not necessarily superior in all ways.
Because there are ways in which it is clearly not superior - there can be considerable tracts of the Group stages which are not competitive at all, and you know, you’d miss the bit of competition.
Not that we’re cribbing here, because after all, it is football. And as we have discovered so many times, you should never not watch a football match.
For example, at lunchtime next Sunday you may think you can get away with not watching the first Super Sunday match of the season, Arsenal at home to West Ham. You may have that one marked down as an obvious home win, but again I would remind you of the great rule: you should never not watch a football match.
I know a man who decided one night that he couldn’t be bothered watching the Arsenal and Reading in the Capital One Cup - the game finished 7-5 to the Arsenal, after extra time. That man found out, the hard way, that you should never not watch a football match.

And still…still they come with their cribbing about how ludicrous it is for people from, say, Roscommon, to be regarding themselves as Liverpool fans. In fact, Irish people have been supporting English football teams for so long now, as a natural expression of their humanity and of their longing for a bit of diversion in their lives, it can with some justification be called our national game.

In a similar move, people from Roscommon became fans of the Beatles without thinking it was ridiculous, what with all the great Roscommon bands they could have supported at the time.

Thank God we can admire aspects of a culture other than our own, that we are so open-minded.
Thank God…
Sunday Independent

I’m the opposite. While I’ve always been a Liverpool fan, (fanatically from January 1987 to February 1991, with a number of lower peaks over the following 20 years) and keen watcher of our domestic football, my interest in Liverpool FC and by association the wider league has, after a long period of relative apathy, once again increased significantly since January 2011.

A perfect storm of events conspired in that month to reignite my passion.
i) King Kenny Dalglish was reappointed as Liverpool manager.
ii) King Luis Suarez signed for Liverpool.
iii) Richard Keys and Andy Gray left Sky Sports, and after a short perod of transition were replaced by a new, top class presentation and analysis team led by Ed Chamberlain and Gary Neville.

There were other contributory reasons. A quick glance through my circa 35,000 posts will show that before January 2011, very few of them were Liverpool FC-related. I was happy to leave that niche to the likes @ClarkeyCat and @farmerinthecity.

However their decline as posters meant there was a gap in the market. I saw an oppurtunity to position myself as the primary Liverpool-supporting blowhard here, and bring a much needed reinvention to an INTERNET persona that others were beginning to find tiresome. I was delighted to seize that oppurtunity. A glance at my posting record since January 2011 quickly shows that 89.4% of my posts since then have been Liverpool FC-related.

Being in a position of such responsibility means that the result of every match is important to me in terms of my credibility as an INTERNET standard bearer for the club. That’s an exciting position to be in, a real adrenaline rush.

Around the same time as my interest in Liverpool FC was rekindled, I began to see the folly of taking much of an interest in other leagues, for the simple reason that they are, for the most part, shit - they’re either processions dominated by one or two mega-rich teams, or played in front of largely empty stadiums with shit atmospheres, or played by teams I have no emotional attachment to whatsoever, or usually, a combination of all those things.

English football is OUR football - it’s home. I like home comforts and I don’t regret for a second that decision I made in January 2011 to come home.

Tiger Tim has done some very shrewd business in the transfer market . I envisage hitting the heady heights of 10th-12th with another couple still to come in.

1 Like

Players salaries means for most of them winning is a nice to have. Mourinho Magic seems to be to compel players to win. Lifestyle of the top players means a trophy is not a priority for them.

Will still watch it and hope Liverpool do well. But it is hollower. Other factor is you know if Benteke for example is a success he is off to Spain in a year or two so it is harder as a fan to invest in players

I expect Slaven Bilic to be exposed as a fraud of a manager and West Ham to be relegated.

1 Like

@Sidney - where can I get those statistical returns for my posts? Unreal.

@Little_Lord_Fauntleroy’s mate who was doing statistical analysis with a GAA team a couple of years ago does them.

2 Likes

Predicted League Table:

  1. Chelsea
  2. Manchester United
  3. Arsenal
  4. Tottenham Hotspur
  5. Liverpool
  6. Manchester City
  7. Southampton
  8. Newcastle United
  9. West Bromwich Albion
  10. Swansea City
  11. Stoke City
  12. Everton
  13. Crystal Palace
  14. Aston Villa
  15. Sunderland
  16. Norwich City
  17. Leicester City
  18. West Ham United
  19. Bournemouth
  20. Watford

Chelsea
Arsenal
Man City
Liverpool
Manchester Utd
Southampton
Newcastle United
West Bromwich Albion
Swansea City
Stoke City
Everton
Crystal Palace
Spurs.
Aston Villa
Sunderland
Norwich City
Leicester City
West Ham United
Bournemouth
Watford

I watch for Arsenal and Arsenal alone. Virtually no interest in watching a match between the other 19 teams unless I have money on it.

I mainly watch Arsenal because of the great Arsene Wenger. A true gent and a great great man.

It’ll be a straight battle for the title between Liverpool and Arsenal. Chelsea haven’t strengthened at all and have signed a dud striker who’ll weaken them. I expect them to fall away.

Manchester United’s outfield signings will probably add 10 points to last season’s total but De Gea’s absence will take 15 points off them from last season.

Manchester City’s dressing room will be poison.

  1. Liverpool
  2. The Arsenal
  3. Everton
  4. Manchester United
  5. Chelsea
  6. Tottenham Hotspur
  7. Manchester City
  8. Swansea
  9. Southampton
  10. Crystal Palace
  11. Stoke
  12. Aston Villa
  13. Norwich
  14. Watford
  15. West Bromwich Albion
  16. Newcastle
  17. Sunderland
  18. West Ham
  19. Bournemouth
  20. Leicester

Top scorer: Christian Benteke (Liverpool)
Football Writers Player of the Year: Philippe Coutinho (Liverpool)
Players’ Player of the Year: Aaron Ramsey (The Arsenal)
Manager of the Year: Brendan Rodgers (Liverpool)
First manager to be sacked: Claudio Ranieri (Leicester)
Last manager to be sacked: Eddie Howe (Bournemouth - with them in 17th place in early March, to be followed by a late season collapse)

+1…

I care primarily about my fantasy team, they are the only team i want to win the league really, ive had a few fruitful seasons, winning my primary league by 200 points two years ago and coming in the top 5k worldwide in the process. in this time i can honestly say ive never watched a full 90 minutes of english soccerball. Tried once or twice but fell asleep on the couch, on occasions it was on in pubs but i was far more interested in whipping my own charges into shape by refreshing the points page on the fantasy site. Fantasy soccer will now forever be overshadowed by NFLFF and redzone which is the pinnacle of our progress as a species. Concussions will ruin the true football in years to come so soak it up while you can.

Declan Lynch must have been beaten black and blue by a few gaa lads in his youth, on several occasions. He must seeth when the championship kicks in and rightly takes over the airwaves. I may start a twitter campaign of terror against him.