La Liga? Premier League? Why This Is the Season for Devotees to Embrace Both

It’s started already. 

“I can NOT believe your folks would spend that sor’a coin,” bemoaned one of them. Agreeing, another one nodded, gruffly muttering: “Absolute bollocks.”

Looking back at them, a menacing sort of grin on his face, the third was loving it. “You’re just pissed that my folks ‘ave more dough than yours,” he snapped back. 

In fairness to Jurgen Klopp, Arsene Wenger and Jose Mourinho, they’re not at all the words that they used as they shot back and forth over the arrival of Paul Pogba at Manchester United. But they may as well have been; that is essentially what they’d said, and this is the soap opera that is the Premier League. 

Right now, England’s top division feels as though it’s put itself in overdrive mode. The influx of mega managers has made it more personality driven than perhaps ever before; massive spending has given it a glitzy feel; the Hollywoodish arrival of Pogba at United has given it a cultural cool. 

This is modern football, they say. And yet it’s not like this everywhere. 

PogBOOM is coming to Old Trafford.@paulpogba: Welcome home to @ManUtd.#FirstNeverFollowshttps://t.co/UKrEgp7Mcy

— adidasfootball (@adidasfootball) August 8, 2016

In Spain, the current summer surrounding La Liga has felt remarkably quiet in comparison. The big clubs are unusually stable all at the same time, the list of shiny new things from the transfer market is short, personalities aren’t running into each other like small planets, and there’s been little bickering between the usual sides. 

For La Liga, it will soon come, but the “it” will be so different.

And that’s the point: The extreme contrast between these leagues will make for a rich footballing cocktail for fans in the season ahead. 

This is the time to embrace them both—if you can put aside football’s new, peculiar kind of fandom. 

This particular fandom is difficult to get your head around.   

“Boring! Uncompetitive! Two-team league!” they shout from one side. “Long-ball rubbish! Over-hyped junk!” they shout back from the other.

This has become the argument that’s always there, only needing the tiniest of triggers for it to burst into life. In each stance, there might be a small degree of the truth amid the irrational noise, but the whole thing is tiresome anyway; bemusing, too.

When did fandom extend itself to leagues as a whole? When did it become necessary to relentlessly promote a league rather than a team, and thus completely reject the other?

When did it become “Long live the Premier League” vs. “Viva La Liga”?

Such a phenomenon isn’t limited to just these two, but it’s between the top divisions of England and Spain that this odd feud roars loudest. Premier League devotees look down on …

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