Heaven's a very boring place, Dude. You'll find that over the millennia.

http://www.bigsoccer.com/forum/showthread.php?t=522011

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Just over a year ago my team, Reading, clinched promotion to the premiership for the first time in history. The chairman called it the fulfilment of a dream and few fans disagreed. At the start of the season the talk was of possibly staying up. A comfortable mid-table finish was dreamworld. And here we find ourselves in 9th, with a bottom half finish regarded as disappointing, but strangely a lot of fans aren’t as pleased as you’d expect. The truth is, despite all the hype, the premiership just isn’t that good.

Don’t get me wrong, it has a lot of good points. For those of us who can shudder at the memory of seeing the Madejski Stadium 90% empty for Autoglass Trophy fixtures, having it sold out every week is something that’s very easy to get used to. The football we can play is a usually a joy to watch, and is as far removed from the Cretaceous growl that almost sent us to the 4th division in the late 1980s as a medieval traitor’s head is from his body.

The chance to watch in large modern stadiums is a gift to those who recall years of standing out on exposed terraces, fending of the uphill rain that always greeted away terraces in grounds that often looked capable of blowing away in a stiff breeze.

But being in the premiership? It’s nice, don’t get me wrong. I certainly don’t harbour a wish to be travelling to Burnley and Cardiff again in a hurry, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that you’ve gone up in the world and moved to a posh new neighbourhood, only to find you really can’t stand the neighbours.

For a start, a lack of major trophies is now seen as some kind of insult by fans who appear to think they’ve turned up to play top trumps rather than watch football, regardless of how long ago their own successes may have been. “Where were you when you were good?” being the only fitting riposte to Aston Villa fans displaying that week’s incomprehension of the phenomenon of promoted teams seeing their crowds rise, with the answer, on the whole, seeming to be at least 50% still inside their mother’s ovaries.

Then there’s the media coverage. If you get past the fact that bi-polar disorders are a prerequisite of premiership journalism, with every slight fluctuation in form extrapolated into a runaway train of results, you get struck by the fact that most experts, beyond the big clubs, really don’t have a clue what they are talking about. And what’s worse, nobody seems to care. The marks out of 10 in papers are always 7s and 8s for the winning team and 5s and 6s for the losers, regardless of how closely fought the game was. In 9 months of the season the BBC’s flagship premiership highlights programme, analysis of my team’s season has yet to get beyond the fact that we “have pace”. We don’t even have pace, not exceptionally anyway. One of our key players is Glen Little, who’d need time-lapse photography to even look moderately brisk.

Then there’s the ticket prices. It’s not a good sign when you think a ticket is cheap because it’s only £32. The club chairmen always come out and say ticket prices are competitive. Competitive with what exactly? The Opera? Ringside seats at a world title fight? The price of the Koh-i-Noor diamond?

And to watch the premiership itself, watching two teams battle it out in a four-horse race, without even a glimmer of an underdog to go for. Even the battle for fouth, to see who gets the last change to stick their snout in the trough of champions league cash, is lacking as the 5th team is Bolton. As much as everyone admires Bolton, in football terms they have a face only a mother could love, so the rest leaves little to enjoy but the Schadenfreude of seeing how humorously everyone else can underperform.

You have to go back nearly 25 years for a time when the relegation battle was more interesting than the battle at the top, as that was in the peak of Liverpool’s dominance. But even then, you still felt Liverpool owed their superiority through knowing how to blend a team, rather than just being able to outspend everyone.

And yet the premiership is the most popular league in the world. Where logic may dictate that fans should be turning off, they are tuning on in ever greater numbers. Why? The answer is simple, as are the viewers. In a world were the most popular tv shows are homogenized throughout the world, where everyone has their own big brother and pop idol and all the myriad of derivatives, where formulae are as likely to be studied for a media studies degree as a chemistry one, the premiership delivers exactly what today’s undiscerning viewer wants – exactly the same show as last week.

Just as the viewer, fingers poised for the phone vote, wants every single series of pop idol to be exactly like the last one, and will never tire of watching the latest batch of fame-seeking morons demonstrate their shallowness on big brother, the armchair fan, seemingly gaffer-taped to his sofa, will never tire of seeing the same 4 teams at the top. They are the top teams, so why spoil it by letting any of the supporting cast do anything other than lose to them? They are merely a plinth for the big 4 to stand on. And they like that the teams that come up struggle. After all, someone like Fulham has been in the premiership for as long as they can remember. Why spoil it by replacing them with a team of nobodies from elsewhere?

At the rate the wealth gap is increasing currently, it’ll soon be a league with four Harlem Globetrotters and 16 Washington Generals, and we’ll all know just how much the public tired of watching those games.

The premiership is as comfortable as an old pair of trainers, and as challenging as an episode of Friends. And just as pretty much everyone tunes is for “…the one where they do something similar to what they do every other week” the premiership has found its formula for keeping that TV money rolling in.