The Premier League is a tale of haves, have nots and the ones who have everything and want what you have

Open this photo in gallery:

Two small, recent stories tell you about the divergent paths the English Premier League is taking.

The first is a have-not story. Wolverhampton is a small country club that survives on its wits. It became famous in recent years for its recruitment strategy – ‘If he’s Portuguese, hire him.’ It worked, until it didn’t.

Wolves don’t sell replica kits in China, which makes keeping up with the EPL Joneses a struggle. Having only just avoided relegation last season, they told their sexy new manager, Julen Lopetegui, they couldn’t afford all the players he wanted to buy. So, a week before the season starts on Friday, Lopetegui quit.

When’s the last time a coach quit in North America? You can’t shake them off here. It doesn’t matter how fast you pull away, they manage to get a death grip on the bumper. But those rules don’t apply in elite soccer, where there is always an owner somewhere with more money and less sense.

The second story is a have story. Manchester United has been thrashing around for a decade. Such is United’s economic gravity that even when it is doing everything in its power to fail, it still manages to succeed, if only financially. But it may have finally found the straw to stir its enormously profitable drink – Dutch manager Erik ten Hag.

By the look of him, no one in the world is having less fun than ten Hag. But whatever he’s doing is starting to work. Not working, present tense. But appearing as though it might some day work, possibly years from now.

So when ten Hag demanded the club give him an enormous VIP suite near the players’ field entrance, it did.

What are the players going to do in there? Eat. Maybe stretch a bit. They prefer to spend the hour or so before game time there than in their own locker room, which I imagine is not suitable to white-linen tablecloth service. Cost to Manchester United – about a half-million dollars in lost revenue. Per game.

This divide was ever thus, but it’s taken on a new urgency this summer with the arrival of the Saudis.

Foreign oil money has been warping the Premier League for 20 years, but that wasn’t competition. It was tulip fever. Oligarchs and sheikhs bought flagging English teams and spent shocking amounts kitting out them out with the latest talent.

But you knew it couldn’t last once people started to bring – ugh – morality into it. An oligarch had his team snatched back by the English government and the sheikhs never heard the end of it about human rights.

After the English press led a hue and cry at the World Cup in Qatar, the Gulf powers apparently had enough. They’ve set up their own shop across the street and begun hiring away the Premier League’s best (or at least, most famous) employees.

If this were two real businesses in competition, we’d wait to see whose plan worked better. But the Saudi league is not a business. It’s an aesthetic choice. As long as the Saudis want to spend their cash on soccer players instead of art or yachts, they can.

Whatever philosophical barrier there was to this shift was knocked over this summer. The ethical question was waved away when famously nice guys such as N’Golo Kanté and Jordan Henderson changed sides.

So for the first time in its history, the Premier League finds itself in real competition with another league. Not in terms of whose teams are better, but in terms of who sets the terms.

With this trade war brewing in the background, this Premier League season will begin looking like a continuation of the last.

Who’s best? Manchester City, still, and by a mile.

City is protected by Gulf money as well, though less of it than in years past. Many more players left this summer than arrived. Cost savings, apparently.

Still, the hundreds of millions spent in seasons past means that there is so much human talent remaining, it’s unlikely much of it will see the field regularly.

Everyone coming up behind City is in some state of dishevelment. Arsenal should have won last year’s title, but blew it near the end. It returns with essentially the same roster. Does that mean essentially the same result? Whatever the case, you know that’s what people will say, and so that will be what the team is thinking. Bad combo.

Chelsea is adapting to life with a billionaire American owner instead of a billionaire Russian one. The difference? Americans think they understand everything, especially the things they don’t. Having spent more than a billion dollars on players last year, Chelsea is already in the midst of a second rebuild under a new manager.

Manchester United finished third last year. Now it thinks it has identified the problem – the pregame meal’s ambience. Ten Hag better do better this season than he did last, or the backsliding into disarray will begin again.

There’s also Newcastle (Saudi-owned), Liverpool (an example of why analytics work, but not as well as cash) and maybe Tottenham (though not really now that Harry Kane is leaving).

After that it’s a mess of teams in the middle. They are not owned by billionaires, oil-rich or otherwise. They’re community concerns kept afloat by smart management, bargain hunting and a share of the TV money. Your Brightons, Brentfords and Wolverhamptons.

Their primary goals are, in order, remaining in the Premier League at all costs, and developing young players they can sell to the Citys and Uniteds in order that they may remain in business.

As complex supply chains go, it’s not exactly turning cobalt into iPhones. You can imagine how an infinity-pocketed investor with the desire to do harm could disrupt it.

That is the three-pronged story of the EPL in 2023-24. There are the usual haves and have-nots. And then lurking somewhere in the background, there is the have-everything that might also like to have whatever you have.