Having a proper Premier League race isn’t just good to watch, it’s good for comedy

This is the introductory paragraph, in which Tactically Naive greets you, invites you to consider that football is good, mostly, and then salutes you for your agreement. This establishes a feeling of mutual interest and respect, which then encourages you to proceed to the rest of the column. Did it work? Excellent.

We begin with a quick round of everybody’s favourite distracting pastime: Count! Those! Horses!

Let’s start in Italy. Hmm, Juventus seem to be six points clear already. Seven wins from seven, 16 scored, and only five conceded. Seems pretty clear to us, even this early. Italy: a one-horse race! Sorry, Italy.

Off to Spain next. Looks like Real Madrid and Barcelona have made similar starts: four wins, two draws, and a single loss. But Sevilla are just a point behind, having inflicted that solitary defeat on Madrid, and Atletico are also lurking with intent. Could be two plus two; could be four. Let’s hope for four, and wait and see.

Finally, to England. Chelsea’s 1-1 draw with Liverpool on Saturday has put the Blues two points behind their opponents from this weekend, as well as Manchester City, who eased past Brighton. It is, of course, extremely early to be counting horses, let alone our chickens, but it’s starting to look like we might just get a proper, multi-team, season-long title race. Three horses! Three.

It’s been a while. Last season City demolished everything in unanswerable style, and the season before Chelsea broke the back of the opposition before Christmas. Even Leicester’s miracle ended in comfortable fashion. It’s time we got a proper Premier League scrap again.

This isn’t just the selfish, bratty entitlement of a weekly column that watches a lot of the Premier League. Oh no. (Though obviously it is that a bit.) Consider the recent pattern of the Premier League:

The pattern is clear. Close Premier League title races aren’t just exciting, in all the usual sporting ways. They are funny. They are gifts to the footballing world: a strange cocktail of athletic brilliance and procedurally-generated farce that tastes sweeter than anything else, and lingers in the memory for years. Aguero! Gerrard!

The Premier League is an appalling thing in lots of ways, but when it works, there’s nothing quite like it. And this time around, Liverpool have some depth, Chelsea are having fun, and City are still City, they’re just not lonely any more. The defending champions host Liverpool next week. Three horses! Three. It’s been a while.

Instagram; handshakes; life; television cameras; people who think they’re bigger than the club; Phil Jones missing a penalty; Eric Bailly taking a penalty, even though he scored his; everybody who isn’t Scott McTominay; Manuel Pellegrini in particular; the London Stadium; the faint echo of lost hope in the wind, come on, you can hear it too, right? Right.

If your childhood was anything like Tactically Naive’s, then a fair chunk of it was spent looking at sporting lists. Lists of cup winners, lists of cup losers. Lists of top scorers, lists of appearance makers. Lists of opening batsmen sorted by average. Lists of lists, in all probability.

It was an exciting time. Some of this was even done before the internet and Wikipedia came to ruin the pub quiz. Lists printed on crinkled yellow vellum, read by candlelight, as horses clip-clopped past TN’s wattle-and-daub hovel.

Lists are important. They are a place of first encounter: the eye snags on a strange name, one that doesn’t seem to fit, and then the reader is dragged into the story. Many years from now, as robot fish swim past their pressure-sealed bio-dome, a child sits, idly scanning the list of Premier League winners from back in the day:

United, United, Chelsea, United ... boring ... huh, there’s Manchester City, that was a thing ... United, City, Chelsea— wait, Leicester City? How the hell did that happen?

And off they’ll go, back into the exciting adventure of Claudio Ranieri and Jamie Vardy, in fully immersive VR holodeck simulation, narrated by a 200-year-old Serge from Kasabian.

So with all this in mind, let us thank Luka Modric for doing the necessary, and wresting an individual award from the duumvirate of Messi and Ronaldo. Whatever your chosen side in the great debate — or, alternatively, the wholly contrived, total non-debate — it’s impossible to deny that their grip on the men’s individual awards has led to a certain predictability in the lists. And predictability is the enemy of discovery.

Ultimately, it’s a question of stories. Take any random five-year chunk of the list of Ballon d’Or winners, for example, and you’ll find at least two or three stories waiting to be discovered: Kevin Keegan’s spell at Hamburg, perhaps, or Flórián Albert’s ascent to the top of the European game, or the back to back seasons of AC Milan hegemony. Take any five years since 2008 and what have you got?

Messi was better in this season than Ronaldo, and this one, but then Ronaldo was better in this one, and this one as well, but — oh! — here comes Messi back again.

Which has been a big story, yes, with multiple seasons, ups and downs, backs and forths, trophy after trophy, and an awful lot of goals. But the fact that it’s been the two of them for so long of it has rendered it into one story, and a seriously boring list. Here’s to an immediate future of many stories, and a distant future of multiple discoveries.

That Luka Modric. Winning Best Player after those two. He must have been pretty good ...

Broadly speaking, TN’s brief is: “Isn’t football great? Yes. Let’s talk about how football’s been great this week.”

But sometimes, football’s awful. This week Der Spiegel of Germany published an extremely detailed, serious, strongly evidenced allegation that Cristiano Ronaldo sexually assaulted a woman named Kathryn Mayorga in 2009.

Quite where this goes next isn’t clear. As a story, much of the world’s press is keeping a studious distance, reporting mostly the reactions from the Ronaldo camp. Presumably there are reasons for this: TN suspects some combination of caution with regard to libel, a lack of general access to Der Spiegel’s evidence, and some good old fashioned cowardice when it comes to the interests of rich, powerful, famous men.

Whether that changes remains to be seen. But here’s what needs to be done at the moment: read Der Spiegel’s piece (content warning, obviously); read this supporting Twitter thread by one of the journalists involved; and pay heed, seriously and with empathy, to the allegations.