Knowledge is power. But is it fun to watch?

Few things deteriorate as quickly as the element of surprise, once exposed to the pressurized, accelerated conditions that elite football provides. In most cases the half-life will not exceed 90 minutes. Even under extreme, extenuating circumstances, this is unlikely to be more than double.

These days, two games – one home, one away – is all it takes to learn everything there is to know about a particular rival. Two games provide three hours of footage that an opposing manager and his coaching staff can use for insights. They generate vast amounts of data for analysts to delve into.

And of course, they provide a large enough sample for the players to learn for themselves. “When you play someone twice every season you start to see the little details,” says Newcastle defender Dan Burn. recently told the BBC. As a rule, Burn said, teams go into games “knowing what’s coming.”

There are exceptions, of course: newly promoted teams, sides that have called up a large number of reinforcements and managers who have only recently arrived at a club are easier to decode on paper than on grass. Yet even their secrets are relatively fleeting.

“Look at Leeds when they came up under Bielsa,” Burn said. “That first year the players were running all over the place and no one had a clue what to do.” After a year, however, opponents began not only to understand Bielsa’s system, but also to find ways to counter it.

However, knowing what is coming is not the same as being able to stop it. For the most part, Burn said, everyone knows full well what Manchester City will try to do when it takes the field. However, the quality that Pep Guardiola has is so high that there is not much you can do about it.

It is difficult to overestimate how much football has changed in the past thirty years. It is faster, fitter, technically better and more tactically advanced than ever before. It is richer, more popular, more glamorous and more powerful: simultaneously a juggernaut, a leviathan and a hegemon.

But just as important as any of these qualities is that it knows far more about itself than at any time in its history. In a way that until recently was considered heresy, football has come to understand its inner workings and its silent rhythms. It has learned to see itself as an intellectual as well as an athletic exercise.

That is of course inevitable in an information age. Teams are encouraged – in fact required – to pursue any advantage that could increase their chances of victory. They may be more talented, energetic, or diligent than their opponents. Or it could be a result of being better informed. After all, knowledge is power.

The problem is that football, like all sports, has another necessity: to entertain. The sport’s booming economics rest on the idea that people will pay to watch it, either through exorbitantly priced tickets or through exorbitantly priced subscription packages. In return, they will demand a compelling and compelling spectacle.

This alliance is considerably more uncomfortable than we often admit. Everyone in football, from the managers and players to the coaches and analysts, is paid to win. If they don’t win, they usually don’t get paid anymore. That is the performance measure that matters most to them. Whether the rest of us find it entertaining or not is a secondary consideration at best.

However, that tension is worth taking into account if we consider football as an information war. It’s hard to argue that football is becoming less entertaining. It is true that there are variations from season to season – some will necessarily be more attractive than others – but the overall curve is upward.

This edition of the Premier League could be the most exciting in a while. In Germany, Bayer Leverkusen has emerged as a real threat to Bayern Munich. Four teams will compete for the title in Spain, at least two in Italy. Extensive, adventurous football has become the norm across Europe.

A completely new way of thinking is emerging in Brazil. Major League Soccer continues to develop and improve. Saudi Arabia is trying to build an elite league from scratch. And all that pales in comparison to women’s football, which is racing forward every year, not only in Europe and North America, but also in Africa, Australia and South America.

All of this has been achieved – perhaps accelerated – by the game’s pursuit of knowledge. By understanding itself, football has been able to push the boundaries of its own possibilities. Information has enhanced the spectacle rather than diminished it.

Whether that will always be the case is another matter. When you listen to Burn, the game becomes not a physical contest – the fluid, chaotic ballet that football thinks it is – but a mental contest, less a series of individual battles than a series of collective, strategic maneuvers.

For ninety minutes, two teams that cannot be surprised, that know exactly what the other is trying to do, perform a series of feints, shifts and tricks as they try to identify a weakness, create a vulnerability. The winner is the one who manages to create even the smallest imbalances.

Where that leads is a purely theoretical exercise, but it is possible that the natural conclusion is not further growth but an unbreakable stalemate, where the sport is no longer lifted by its knowledge but burdened by it, where the urge to winning comes at some point. at the expense of the need to entertain. After all, familiarity breeds contempt, and there are times when there is such a thing as knowing too much.

An irony for everyone. Well, almost everyone.

There is a very modern fairytale in the story of Girona, the team currently at the top of La Liga who made the short trip to Barcelona last weekend and emerged with a surprise, favorable win. After all, this is a small-town team currently holding off not only Barcelona but Real Madrid, a David conquering two Goliaths.

Only, because this is modern football, David is not quite what it seems. Girona is owned by City Football Group, the investment network run by the owners of Manchester City and which currently includes teams from Italy, France, Belgium, Spain, Uruguay, India, China, Australia and the United States.

Club networks themselves are a topic that needs to be considered and explored in more detail – and that will come in due course – but for now let’s focus on just one of the complications this situation presents. It is (almost) possible that Girona holds out and wins La Liga. It is (almost) possible that one of Arsenal, Liverpool or Aston Villa will stop Manchester City from winning the Premier League.

The point is that under current UEFA rules, two teams with the same ultimate beneficial owner cannot play in the same competition. Which in this case would mean that Girona will play in the Champions League next season and that Manchester City will be relegated to the Europa League. Perhaps this model does have advantages after all.

Assembly toll

There is an unfortunate tendency in football to only see the fine details, and not the big picture. Manchester United travel to Liverpool on Sunday missing, depending on late fitness tests and how far they can fix Harry Maguire’s wiring, somewhere between nine and 13 players.

Within that figure are self-inflicted wounds. For example, Jadon Sancho continues to be left out of Erik Ten Hag’s teams for reasons that are not entirely clear and no longer seem proportionate to the original offense. United captain Bruno Fernandes has been effectively suspended. for stupidity.

However, the vast majority of absences can be attributed to injuries. In that respect, United can hardly claim any particular misfortune. Newcastle’s lofty ambitions are currently stifled by the absence of a dozen of its key players; Tottenham’s fast start was derailed by injuries to around ten of Ange Postecoglou’s players.

As a rule, these missing players are all treated as isolated crises. United’s problems show how poorly they have spent their vast cash reserves. Newcastle is struggling in the Champions League. Tottenham’s selection is unbalanced and incomplete.

However, that treatment doesn’t take into account the fact that Bournemouth, Crystal Palace and Chelsea are all also burdened with full treatment rooms, or that AC Milan have seen their squad torn apart by injuries. It almost seems like all of these things are connected, and that three years of near-constant football is starting to take its toll on the game’s elite players, and the sport itself is starting to show wear and tear.

Correspondence

With pain in my heart I have to confess something. There were a few minor elements in last week’s newsletter that were not meant entirely seriously.

“I read with stunning disbelief that you consider Zlatan’s time at LA Galaxy to be “low-key”. Rob Pait complained. “Zlatan was a wonderful heel for the Galaxy, raising the profile of an emerging El Trafico rivalry to cauldron level from his first appearance.”

This is of course absolutely true. It’s just that the policy of this newsletter is not to add more fuel to the fire that Ibrahimovic can stoke himself.

Steven GreenMeanwhile, he was among the “30 Rock” fans who took issue with the (again, not entirely serious) idea that the show might be “problematic.”

“Do we really need your liberal guilt?” he asked. Unfortunately, this is the thing about virtue signaling. You have to do it even if people specifically ask you to stop.

It was also moving to see how many of you are more than willing to provide – for free – the kind of advice that major sports leagues would actually have to buy from consulting firms for millions of dollars.

“One area where the Premier League could adopt direct-to-consumer broadcasting is in countries with big appetites and mediocre broadcasters,” Will Clark Shim wrote. “My experience in South Korea is tirelessly repeating games with Korean stars. Live games are rare, most take place at odd hours, and even access to high-quality highlights is limited.”

That’s exactly the kind of market where it might one day make sense for the Premier League to dip its toe into the water. Unless a growing, upstart league arrives first. “Should the Saudi Pro League go streaming, or do the kind of broadcast deal Apple has with the MLS?” asked Mohammed Sayeed Khan.

We’ve written before about the significance – or otherwise – of real football matches for what the Saudi Pro League does trying to achieve, but at this stage in its development, streaming would almost certainly be a bad idea. Arranging a specific highlights package with TikTok, on the other hand, could work very well.

That’s it for this week. If you would like to help any of the world’s major leagues with your thoughts, send them to askrory@nytimes.com and we will do our best to pass them on to the appropriate officials/executives/tyrants.