Gavin Cooney: This World Cup has shown the Premier League to be football’s Starbucks

With Germany out of the tournament, perhaps their people can now busy themselves with finding a compound adjective to describe our dispiriting realisation that there is so little mystery left in the World Cup.

There is a very specific kind of disappointment in discovering that you already know about Brazil’s hotshot teenage winger because he plays for Bournemouth, or that the guys on whom Ecuador and Haiti relied for goals are already known to you as Premier League flops or cult heroes. We should be rapt to their stories rather than standing at some ironic remove from them, rolling our eyes at the notion that Enner Valencia could carry the hopes of a nation because we know how bad he was at West Ham.

This loss of mystery is mostly the Premier League’s fault. The competition’s pile of wealth is now so big that it exerts its own gravitational pull, dragging players from all across the globe and into the spotlight before the World Cup has the chance to do so. English football has become a kind of gentrifying force on world football, making everyone and everything feel familiar. This is why Crystal Palace have more players at this World Cup than Real Madrid, and why three of the managers who qualified for the first knock-out round once coached Everton.

But for all that it feels like the Premier League has conquered world football, look beyond the blandly familiar and you will realise that the standard of England’s vaunted league has slumped. List the superstars presently beguiling this tournament: only Erling Haaland is playing in England.

Kylian Mbappé, Vinícius Júnior and Lamine Yamal are all in Spain; Ousmane Dembélé and Bradley Barcola are settled in France; Michael Olise and Luis Díaz play in Germany; Lionel Messi is ticking over in the US; Pico Lopes is in the League of Ireland.

Even the two players on whom England are so reliant, Harry Kane and Jude Bellingham, play in Munich and Madrid respectively. England’s only other goalscorer at this tournament so far is Marcus Rashford, who spent last season at Barcelona, which goes to show that England have too few players playing outside of the Premier League. Their only other two world-class players, Declan Rice and Bukayo Saka, are effectively injured, having been ground down by the brutal demands of winning the league with Arsenal.

Perhaps Olise’s blooming for France has something to do with swapping England for the tamer demands of the Bundesliga. Having sat out 18 games of his final season with Palace because of muscle problems, he hasn’t missed a single game for Bayern Munich through injury across two seasons.

England are also suffering from the dominant style of their league. Thomas Tuchel has consistently said his team should reflect the image of the Premier League, which he describes as “a very physical, direct league”. Tuchel has remained true to his word, which has been England’s problem. They are playing in the perfect mould of a modern Premier League team, as they elevate physicality over technicality and attack cautiously as they worry more about preventing an opposition counterattack than scoring themselves.

Assistant coach Anthony Barry’s interview at half-time of England’s deadening draw against Ghana gave this game away. England were yet to have a shot on target, yet their coach praised their “stable base” and spoke of how they hoped to crack open the game by scoring from a set piece. This was Barry admitting that England came to this World Cup armed to win it like Arsenal: we can keep it tight and take fewer risks in possession because we can score from a corner.

Unfortunately for England, the World Cup’s referees have kneecapped this strategy. The best means of scoring from a corner in the Premier League last season was by the method mastered by Arsenal and delightfully titled by football analyst Michael Caley as “the meat wall”, whereby a series of players crowd the goalkeeper to prevent him from punching clear an inswinging corner.

Officiating in the World Cup is much less permissive in this respect, as goalkeepers have been regranted their status as protected species. We saw this in the disallowing of Germany’s extra-time goal against Paraguay on Monday. While the Paraguay goalkeeper flopped meekly to the ground upon contact with Waldemar Anton, the goal was ruled out because the German player did nothing other than try to impede the goalkeeper.

“When an attacking player is not interested in the ball and deliberately moves to obstruct opponents’ movement . . . referees should intervene,” said officials’ chief Pierluigi Collina. In other words, Anton was penalised for being just another piece of meat in the wall.

Past England failures have been pinned on Premier League clubs’ disinterest in developing players, but this may be the first one laid at the feet of the league’s lenient referees. England is, after all, rich with deregulating Brexiteers who have come to bitterly realise there was a good reason for the red tape in the first place.

While England toil beneath the straitjacket they have assumed, the outstanding teams of the tournament so far are France and Argentina, who have liberated their attacking players to connect and improvise among themselves. The once-dowdy and controlling Didier Deschamps, for instance, has literally started bowing in supplication before his players. For Tuchel, this is a terrible artistic direction for the game to take, given he felt he didn’t need any of the creative talents of Cole Palmer, Adam Wharton or Trent Alexander-Arnold.

America’s World Cup has shown the Premier League to be a kind of footballing Starbucks – familiar, pervasive, but really not very good.

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