Oliver Holt says: While the Premier League season crawls to an end with what some people want to believe, the great flourishing of a grim battle for fifth place and a place in a Champions League that contains very few champions, some among the billionaire boys' club that our elite teams are already looking for their rank of media.
Their go-to defense, which they do not dare to speak too hard because they know how absurd it shows, is that their ambitions are thwarted by the limitations that are set to them by profit and sustainability rules.
But the truth is a lot easier and much grim than that: the Premier League has become normal because so many of its top clubs are performed with amazing levels of incompetence and rights.
Looking at Chelsea versus Manchester United on Friday evening, for example, was to stare directly in the face of complacency, arrogance and mismanagement that helped to take such an easy walk for Liverpool, the paving of the so -called Big Six.
The pure scale of the ordinary on Stamford Bridge was surprising. It was a towering monument for mediocrity and professor. The people who are in charge of Chelsea, Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali, told us that they would train us with a reinvestion of how football works, but instead of serving Caviar, they give us tripe.
PSR is not the problem for clubs like Chelsea. The problem for Chelsea and United, in particular, is epic levels of waste that are devised by club hierarchies that in both cases seem enormously exaggerated with managers and are tragically satisfied with the mediocre that they have created.
There were only three or four players of elite quality on that field on Friday evening: Bruno Fernandes for United and Cole Palmer and Moises Caicedo for Chelsea. Reece James gave a rare moment to applaud and cross the brilliant turn that the winner set up for Marc Cucurella.
The wild celebrations of Chelsea on the last whistle felt vague comical. I realize that the qualification for next season's Champions League is important, but they are fighting for fifth place. Their football directors – two of them – have spent £ 1.2 billion and they spent it on so much dross that they might fall out of the top five on the last day of the season.
PSR was supposed to bake in the superiority of clubs such as United and Chelsea. That has emerged as one of the great myths of the recent Premier League history.
It is not necessary that the fears for the PSR critics are unfounded. It is more that if PSR gives the biggest clubs an advantage, clubs such as United and Chelsea seem to blow the intention.
If there was comfort for Chelsea fans on Friday evening, it was that United is run even worse than she is. Chelsea may be normal, but United can only dream to be used to. How did they come to a point where only Fernandes would come from their best XI in the starting line-up of a top six club? No one else would be close by.
So let's bleat a little less about PSR. The reality is that many Premier League clubs spread the enormous amount of wealth at their disposal against the collected riches of their television agreement with one terrible recruitment decision after the other.
At United they get the wrong time and time again with decisions of amateur nights that cost tens of millions of pounds and then Sir Jim Ratcliffe sets up ticket prices, Sacks a few employees in the canteen and cancels free lunches.
It is time for our elite teams to stop passing the goat and taking responsibility. The Premier League loses its shine and it is nobody's fault but that of them.
Why Lineker had to go
It is the right decision for Gary Lineker and the BBC to go their own way now, not later. It has felt for some time as a relationship that has its course, but it was great as long as it lasted.
Lineker was a brilliant football player, one of the greatest strikers that England has ever had, and it is to his eternal honor that he has also become such an accomplished and intelligent broadcaster.
Few thought he could fill the gap that had been left by Des Lynam on the competition of the day, but he did it with Aplomb. He was relaxed and smart and knowledgeable. And he was funny too. When the game of the day came up and he presented it, you knew it would be good.
His opinions and his inspirations and the cultivated convenience of his skills for the camera made it that. I hate it when people involved tell someone involved in sport to 'stay in their job' and I admired Lineker for the monologue he delivered reporting at the BBC's reporting at the 2022 world cup in Qatar at the start of the BBC's.
Most other presenters have implemented the controversy about Qatar's hosting of the tournament and the treatment of migrating employees. He didn't do it.
He recently made a series of mistakes, the most serious of these was the unintended repetition of an anti -Semitic message on social media, which made his position at the BBC untenable.
If you use your platform, such as Lineker in 2023, to assume the Minister of the Interior of the Day, Suella Braverman, about the asylum policy of the VK and to accuse the use of language that Redolent of Nazi Germany uses, it makes it more difficult to argue when you restore ignorance anti-semitic propaganda. Then it was time to go.
Lineker deserves not to be remembered for that, but for all the pleasure he brought millions of viewers every week. He became the Lynam of his era and there can be no higher praise than that. I will miss him when he is gone.
Rahm glides away again in irrelevance
The best sport I saw this weekend was Crystal Palace that Manchester City defeated to win the FA Cup final and to eliminate the first big trophy in their 120-year history.
But when I got home on Saturday evening, I turned on the television and I saw Scottie Scheffler five of the most immaculate holes I have ever seen.
His display at the end of his third round in Quail Hollow laid the foundation for his victory over the US PGA Tournament, his third major triumph.
There was a short game of the game on Sunday when Jon Rahm argued, but Rahm imploded in the last three holes. It was another memory of how Rahm's move to the Liv tour a career derailed that seemed to be on his way to the stars.
He made a pile of money and blew his place in history. This is now the McIlroy-Scheffler show.
RIP, Brian
The first time I met Brian Glanville, was the celebrated and much respected football journalist who died last week at the age of 93, when I was sitting next to him in the press box on Stamford Bridge 30 years ago.
“Lecce has just taken the lead in Milan,” he proclaimed everyone who would listen in the Stentorian voice who often broadcast his love for the Italian game at a time when most of us did not know our lecce of our latte.
I admired Glanville for his endless love for the game and for the way he spoke with managers in post-match press conferences as if they were the same rather than with the reverence that is always lashing in my interactions with them.
He also had a humor acid that it could burn through a laptop. Especially one rule stayed with me.
Some of my friends and I were listening a bit to a coach full of journalists on their way to a game in England and our youthful smoothing out became a bit too much for Brian.
He shot one of my friends a wilting look before he brought his judgment. “I wish I had the recklessness of that man,” he said.