Game in dire need of a more unpredictable top flight

PREMIER LEAGUE:The stranglehold exerted by the 'big four' is having a corrosive effect on football in general, writes ANDREW FIFIELD

LEEDS TRAVEL to Old Trafford this weekend for one of English football’s more charmless occasions but, amid the rose-scented thuggery, Munich songs and the ditties delighting in the death of Don Revie, there might yet be room for a little dewy-eyed nostalgia.

Exactly 10 years ago, the final Premier League table of the 20th century showed Leeds sitting proudly at the summit, a point clear of their old red rivals and 14 points ahead of seventh-placed Chelsea, then little more than a flaky irrelevance for whom winning the League Cup would have prompted a ticker-tape parade down the King’s Road.

Any suggestion that Leeds would go on to spend half the following decade scrabbling around in the nether regions of the Championship and League One would have provoked a few loud scoffs of derision or, in more time-honoured Yorkshire fashion, a close encounter with a pint glass, but that’s life for you.

Just when you think success has finally landed in your lap, she charges you £50 and starts gyrating on some other goggle-eyed punter.

That league table from December 29th, 1999 reads like a medieval morality tale, a cautionary fable to ensure temperance and clean living amid the grubby oiks of England’s top flight.

Of the bottom seven, four clubs, Newcastle United, Derby County, Watford and Sheffield Wednesday are now in the Championship; one, Southampton, is in League One; another, Bradford City, in League Two and one more, Wimbledon, has gone out of existence entirely.

The moral is clear: live within your means, beware lank-haired foreign mercenaries with names like Benito and don’t, for God’s sake, move to a city like Milton Keynes, whose Wikipedia entry lists Kevin Whately, Inspector Morse’s old sidekick, as its biggest celebrity resident.

To declaim that nothing lasts forever in football is hardly a revelation.

At the end of the 1980s, my team, Crystal Palace, were about to progress to their first FA Cup final and finish third in the old First Division – an achievement which, incidentally, was not even enough to guarantee a place in the old Uefa Cup.

Now our best teenagers are sold for a pittance and we are doomed to roam the netherworld of the Championship for eternity – Hamlet’s Ghost with money worries.

Times change, success moves in cycles. That is the way things should be in sport, which is why the stranglehold exerted on the top of the Premier League by Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool – their bank accounts swollen by Champions League cash – and the voluminous parachute payments distributed to those incompetent enough to tumble out of the division have been so corrosive.

It has ensured that, since 2004, not only has it been possible to pinpoint with unerring precision the make-up of the season’s title contenders before a ball has even been kicked, but it has become virtually impossible to stay out of the Premier League for any protracted length of time.

Newcastle and West Bromwich Albion – a club for whom every promotion is an over-promotion – are already firmly on course to return to the land of milk and honey at the first opportunity, and the only reason Middlesbrough are not settled neatly in their slipstream is Steve Gibson’s bizarre decision to sack Gareth Southgate.

This strangulation of genuine competition would, ultimately, have destroyed the Premier League’s credibility, so give thanks for the fact that there are forces beyond the control of even Richard Scudamore and his band of marketing hacks at Gloucester Place.

That pesky global economic meltdown has effectively put the kibosh on Liverpool’s efforts to beef up their finances by moving home and left them resembling the lame, under-sized antelope at the back of the herd which you just know is about to be picked off by a lurking lion.

Then, of course, there is the influx of money from the east, which has given Manchester City a sniff of overhauling their debt-laden neighbours from across town and even afforded hope to previous nonentities such as Birmingham City.

In the meantime, the likes of Martin O’Neill and Harry Redknapp have proved that there is no substitute for experience.

Having enabled Leicester City and West Ham United to punch well above their weight 10 years ago – both were safely ensconced in the top half of the table by the end of the Millennium – they are now showing what they can achieve when the pockets of their chairmen are not simply filled with loose change and lint.

It’s enough to make the established elite shift uncomfortably in their seats as the new decade hurtles towards us, but the prospect of a feisty, unpredictable Premier League where nothing can be taken for granted is something everyone else should raise a glass to.