Five Things We Learned From This Weekend’s Football

Looking back at the BBC transfer gossip round-up archives is a world into a forgotten England – a Hovis advert for the way we were. The Blair years meant many things to many people, but it's too little remembered that "Arsene Wenger and Sir Alex Ferguson will battle it out for £12m West Ham captain Nigel Reo-Coker" were just as much a part of those heady days.

You get the same feeling looking back over the last four years of City progression. As the Mail noticed last month, £327m has been spent since 2011 for them to make two changes to their starting XI – an even more outrageous fact when the two players replaced are Gareth Barry and Joleon Lescott, high-value England regulars at the time but since traded down for Martin Demichelis and Fernando. £327m to go backwards is unprecedented – it's Levy blowing the Bale money four years in a row and not even getting Christian Eriksen; it's Liverpool selling Torres and buying Carroll, Downing and Henderson 27 times.

The result of yesterday's game was predictable – Van Gaal has somehow found a winning formula out of nowhere, and City are in complete collapse. And even though United's transfer policy over that time has been either miserly penny-pinching or the BBC Gossip page's equivalent of shopping on payday while hungry and stoned, City have ludicrously allowed them to catch up from their worst nadir since Jason Dozzell was still knocking about in eight months. We were promised stardust, Kaka, Ronaldinho, Rooney. We were promised the Gorton Globetrotters, and we ended up with what Arsenal look like if you holiday to 2026 on Football Manager, without the trophies.

An Arsenal title challenge killed off by a late Cesc Fabregas goal for Chelsea ought to be hilarious – but due the grim drudgery of the victory and the fact that the idea of a title race was highly fanciful anyway, it's almost passed by without comment. If you can judge a season on its great moments, then that goal was our Ferguson and Kidd on the pitch, our Mourinho touchline slide, the Michael Thomas for the Tidal generation. It couldn't sum it up better.

At the top, this season has been utterly dreadful, and it's clearly shown by the fact all the joy has had to be found elsewhere – in schadenfreude, in cheering on bastards, in glorifying failure. Sherwood's smugness at White Hart Lane, Pardew's witchcraft, Liverpool fucking it up again. Even all this has produced nothing memorable. Rui Faria shouting in Chris Ramsey's face is all we've got. Roll on the summer.

Spurs have undergone a weird trajectory in recent years, going from the balls-out, deeply-flawed thrills of the Redknapp era to being the dullest big team in the league in the blink of an eye. Their weird reticence towards playing anything resembling effective attacking football carried on after Bale left, and when even Tim Sherwood playing 4-4-2 in every game didn't change that, it was hard to deny that some terrible malaise had afflicted them.

Pochettino is changing that. Slowly, but surely, it's changing. Yet with results like this, he's still managed to cling to the old loveable Spurs identity. The smart money now should be on him lasting a long time – stability has finally arrived at White Hart Lane, and Spurs look ready to settle into a nice, long, consistent period of drudging competence, livened up by the odd aneurysm-inducing defeat. The future's bright, the future's Lilywhite, the future's still finishing below Arsenal every fucking year no matter what happens. The team has been on a six-year-long stag night, and they're finally ready to get a mortgage and get hitched to their Argentinian bride. He's not pretty, but he's stable. They'll make it work, be a proper, functioning football team. Please, stop crying. You know I can't take the crying.

Tim Sherwood is an idiot. This is, as Donald Rumsfeld might have said, one of the known knowns. It is apparent from the things he says and does, clearly observable, a matter of objective fact. The unusual thing is that, at the moment, it's not evident in his career.

Sherwood was a ridiculous joke of a figure at Spurs, but the team were nowhere near as bad as his absurd posturing. Now, he has Villa playing well and will probably keep them up where Paul Lambert failed. Yet he remains an idiot. How is it possible?

We don't have the answers, but the people worried by this should be the sad old men scrabbling around in mid-table. Sam Allardyce looked like he was finally enjoying himself, but is now probably packing boxes in his Canary Wharf suite. Tony Pulis, Mark Hughes, Steve Bruce, Neil Warnock – all have failed this season to some degree, failing to achieve anything beyond existence. None of them are a very attractive opportunity for a club to be hiring.

And in the end, it's not been the foreigners with their fancy tactics who've killed them. It's been Garry Monk and Tim Sherwood – just appointing your oldest player or youth coach and hoping for the best is somehow a viable strategy that beats twenty years of managerial experience. It's definitive proof that the game has changed, and it's left a lot of sad old men behind – confused by Brazilian playboys and Senegalese wonderkids, infuriated by 19-year-old England U21s with a Bentley and an entertainment agent, not angry but disappointed at the diving that is rife in the game. Bruce and Hughes used to be gods among men, and now they spent their weekends shouting in exasperation as they watch David Meyler earn more than they do.

It's not normal that the 'Five Things We Learned in This Weekend's Football' section of VICE is more harrowing and bleak than the war reporting, but at least we can end on something of a positive note: there's finally some competition in the Premier League, albeit in the form of a relegation battle. Leicester won, Burnley and QPR are up for it, West Brom are in freefall, Hull aren't winning and anything could happen to Sunderland. Yep, we might actually have something memorable to cling to, as the relegation battle could go right to the wire.

Not just that, but we'll probably see one, two, or perhaps even all three teams who looked utterly doomed manage to get out of it, and a relatively big, unexpected scalp to suffer the drop. It's probably too late for Newcastle to go down – which is a shame, because you shouldn't be allowed to appoint John Carver, lose a derby to Sunderland and then blame it on foreigners at the exact moment UKIP are looking to attract disaffected northern working-class voters without being severely punished – but fans of any clubs below them should start worrying. One of you is going to be seen crying on the last Match of the Day of the season, and I personally cannot wait.

So, there's that to look forward to. Could even make for a thrilling final day. See? This season isn't all doom and gloom – waiting to see which team can earn the right to finish fifteenth for another year and sell their best player to Spurs is really going to make this all worthwhile.

@Callum_TH