Against the backdrop of endless pessimism for the state of the global game it’s important we mark and celebrate the moments when football appears to fight back against its supposedly certain fate.
Football’s elasticity has taken everyone by surprise.
Since the mid-1990s various bubbles were predicted to have burst by now, the centre apparently unable to hold when wages ballooned in the 1990s, when oligarchs came in at the beginning of the 2000s, when monopolies began to form around mainland Europe in the 2010s, or when corruption poured out of FIFA and UEFA at around the same time.
But instead this thing keeps rolling on, the figures spiralling out of control but the core product remaining somehow wholly intact and even, in England at least, surely better than it has been at any point in the 21st century.
Plymouth beating Liverpool in the FA Cup fourth round maybe isn’t the most obvious moment to praise football’s resilience against the forces of neoliberalism.
But Liverpool’s exit from the competition, along with Chelsea’s the previous day and Arsenal’s the previous round, has highlighted the growing strength of the Premier League’s middle class – and opened up the distinct possibility of an unusual FA Cup winner.
Only six years ago we were told, not for the first time, that we were at the end of history; that European football simply could not survive the latest wave of sportswashing.
In 2019, Manchester City’s 6-0 victory over Watford in the FA Cup final was a disaster, a point of no return, an emblem of a sport broken by nation-state ownership.
By 2021, Man City had won five of the last six EFL Cups and it was widely assumed that England would soon follow France in making its secondary domestic cup collateral damage in the insatiable pursuit of wealth.
Fast forward four years and although the problems are very much still alive, English football has begun to bounce back.
The same five clubs have won all but three of the 25 FA Cups in the 21st century, but this year three of them are already out.
The other two, City and Manchester United, are in a crisis of sorts and hardly likely to reach the final.
And although Liverpool are favourites to win the Carabao Cup, Newcastle stand a good shot at winning the competition, while we are guaranteed, at least, to go four straight years without Man City being on the podium.
We have to take these wins where we can find them, and this is not an insignificant one.
Newcastle, Aston Villa, Bournemouth, and most of all Nottingham Forest are showing this season that the Premier League’s mid-tier has emerged as capable of competing, reawakening a league that we all thought was closing down, was going dark.
Should Forest make the top four this season, it will have been half a decade since the Premier League had the same Champions League qualifiers in consecutive years.
It could be the start of something.
The quality of players and managers being lured to the Premier League over the last few years suggests it might be possible for a Newcastle or a Villa to put together a title challenge in the near future.
Certainly the Champions League money being more evenly distributed outside a small cabal of teams makes that more likely.
Not since the 1990s has it looked so plausible that an outsider could build a title-winning side.
Perhaps that is still farfetched, but the possibility even coming into view represents an enormous swing of momentum from where the Premier League was five years ago.
For now – whether as a sign of greater things to come or not – we can enjoy the FA Cup and Carabao Cup reinvigorated by a resurgent middle class.
The same pessimists would argue it comes at a cost, mind.
This isn’t really trickle-down economics in action, so much as England becoming the parasitic Super League its club supporters fought against.
The Premier League the competition has been opened up, but only at the expense of a trashed mainland Europe, where monopolies are on the rise.
You could even say the venture capitalists and petrostates have crushed our spirits so fully we are reduced to celebrating the smallest of wins; reduced to recalibrating our expectations until a couple of FA Cup shocks is lauded as a new dawn for English football.
But the end of football history has been predicted so many times before, yet still it staggers on.
Any sign of life is worthy of celebration, even if it’s just Plymouth clinging on against the league leaders.
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