Let's face it, giving Todd Boehly stick for his All-Star Game idea is like kicking a puppy.
Chelsea’s American owner could not have made himself an easier target had he dressed up as a giant coconut. Where do you want to start with this ridiculous idea? Where do the Midlands clubs fit in? Are players from Wolves, Aston Villa, Leicester City and Nottingham Forest eligible for both teams in this Premier League special? And that is a relatively minor quibble.
There is scheduling, there is the fundamental misunderstanding of the psyche of football fans on these shores. It is fundamentally partisan - we support only our club, our club is the only thing we care about.
In the States, no-one bats an eyelid if a major sports team is moved lock, stock and barrel to another city. In American Football, the Los Angeles Rams have been in LA, then St Louis, and are now back in LA.
Infamously, in 1984, Bob Irsay, owner of the once-mighty Baltimore Colts, organised a moonlight flit to Indianapolis, a mere 600 miles away. In baseball, the Los Angeles Dodgers - now co-owned by Boehly - were once the Brooklyn Dodgers.
There is a different mentality out there. In the NFL, there is actually some sort of rivalry between the American Football Conference and the National Football Conference.
In MLB, there is actually some sort of rivalry between the American League and the National League. That is part of what makes the MLB All-Star game and the NFL Pro Bowl work.
Other than 20 separate clubs, there is no big divide in the Premier League. After all, unlike the NFL and the MLB, the make-up of the Premier League changes every year.
The All-Star idea is a non-starter, obviously, and you would like to think that it was just top-of-the-head nonsense from Boehly rather than a serious proposal. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt on that score.
Would you like to see a Premier League aAll-star game? Have your say in the comments below.
But the daft All-Star suggestion has camouflaged the more worrying things he had to say at a conference in New York. Boehly - who, when asked about the ill-fated Super League, explained he never says “a hard no” - has a significant share in the LA Dodgers, a baseball team that has had the same head coach, Dave Roberts, for six years.
It doesn’t seem like he does change for change’s sake. But his explanation for replacing Thomas Tuchel with Graham Potter was insightful. “Our vision for the club was to find a manager who really wanted to collaborate with us, a coach who really wanted to collaborate.”
Time will tell but that reads a little like they wanted a Yes-man. In his time in the Premier League, it became quite clear that Tuchel was anything but a Yes-man. And not every manager is
If you like this sort of thing, at least you can say Boehly is - unlike some other owners you could mention - both visible and vocal. But the least Potter has to brace himself for is that Boehly is quite clearly going to be very hands-on … very.
