Todd Boehly’s arrival marks the end of Premier League’s era of quiet Americans

Bob Dylan once had a piece of advice for aspiring artists: write 10 songs a day, and then discard nine. In a way this also appears to be Todd Boehly’s approach to improving English football. He is just putting stuff out there, you see. Running ideas up the flagpole and seeing if anyone salutes them. Throwing them out on the stoop and seeing if the cat licks them up. Not necessarily good ideas. Or practical ideas. Or popular ideas. Or ideas that really bear the weight of a moment’s logical thought. But ideas nonetheless.

As such it is not necessary at this stage actually to engage what the Chelsea owner said on stage at Bros, Brews and Brunch business conference in Jerky Falls, Connecticut last week. Spoiler: none of this is actually going to happen. To soberly assess the merits of a north/south all-star game, or relegation playoffs, would be to lend these ideas more consideration and seriousness than Boehly has probably lent them himself. More interesting is the shrillness and scorn of the subsequent discourse: why the throwaway comments of a man named Todd seem to have created such a bruise on the psyche of English football.

In large part this appears to boil down to Boehly being American but more specifically, a very particular kind of American. Boehly is by no means the first American guy trying to make his fortune in English football or to dream of changing it. But he is perhaps the first to be overtly, unashamedly, vocally … American about it. In so doing he is tugging at a largely unresolved tension in our game: between the culture and outlook of the game itself and that of the people who through ownership and viewership exert a greater influence on it than probably any other foreign nation.

Most of Boehly’s