Life ceases to be interesting if you lose the capacity to be surprised.

If Donald Trump is never brought to trial, would you be surprised? Or, if Trump went all Budd Dwyer and killed himself on TV if he’s brought to trial? No. Would you be surprised if you watched the latter back on YouTube several times with the play speed set to 0.25? Probably not.

But at least with Trump there’s some unpredictably of outcome. The Premier League is woefully short of that now. Manchester City comfortably won the Premier League title, again. That’s five out of the last six years they’ve been champions.

They’re currently under investigation by the Premier League for “financial irregularities” in relation to Financial Fair Play compliance. Considering the reputational cost to the Premier League’s branding, and that the Premier League has adopted a frontier attitude to courting wealth, does anyone truly believe they’ll mete out a significant punishment to the most dominant team of the era?

Most of the teams in the Premier League who aren’t in contention for Champions League qualification merely make up the numbers to ensure access to the Premier’s League behemoth TV riches (this is one of the rare instances where a fair distribution of resources becomes a negative). For instance, Nottingham Forest survived via a chaotic transfer policy, playing ugly stuff with a bloated squad of cast-offs and accumulating a transfer spend that would embarrass many of the perennial Champions League clubs in Germany, Italy and Spain.

While the Premier League has become predictable at the top and the bottom, the Tory government, who’ll sell absolutely anything it can while it still can, unwittingly decided to be the source that introduced some unexpected variability to this drab product, decreeing that it would be geopolitically beneficial to the United Kingdom’s (read, their individual) interests to allow one of the worst regimes on the planet into the Premier League owners club.

First, this added another player into the squabble for Champions League football. The only surprise is perhaps the speed at which Newcastle United made it three clubs from six perennially slogging it out instead of three from five. Woot, woot. What a time to be alive.

Beyond the sight of a sovereign wealth fund catapulting Newcastle straight into this echelon of contention, and more importantly to them gaining additional media exposure afforded by the media’s “Big (read, rich) club” designation, the Saudi’s successful encroachment into English football has emboldened them to undertake a project that is likely to further inflate football’s ridiculous bubble. And that will have unforeseen consequences for European and specifically the top flight of English football.

The warnings were there with Saudi Arabia’s forays into Golf and Formula One. I have several explanations to the indifference of their threat to further inflate football’s bubble. One, the assumption that Saudi’s rulers wouldn’t consider it worth their while to invest the necessary sums in football to achieve the same degree of influence they have in Golf. Two, and this is a cultural symptom of the west, we underestimate people of means not from traditionally rich or developed countries. When it comes to business and geopolitics Mohammed bin Salman and the Saudi royal family are serious people, they know they have the advantage of being underestimated and they did their homework. Those running the European game are so venal and operate with short sighted self-interest that it’s easy to maneuver them to act against their own interests. Third, all of us have become so desensitized to the sustained corpulence and inflation in football to some degree. It’s gotten to the point where principles have been abandoned entirely and more and more fans are actively encouraging their clubs to partake in the bubble, or be owned by a sovereign wealth fund or state, that it makes the sport even more fertile for sportswashing.

Some will delude themselves this Saudi money doesn’t matter if it’s only going to thirty and over players grabbing one last pay-day. But Karim Benzema getting £200m a year inflates wages for everyone. And in terms of the unattractiveness of playing in Saudi, don’t forget the it only takes one arsehole principle. Kylian Mbappe said no. But will the next? All it takes is for one of the world’s best twenty-something players to say yes to the Saudi money, that legitimizes the idea of playing over there for a couple of years and could sway those who aren’t yet convinced. Beyond the pressure from family members, hanger-ons and agents to take the multi-generational wealth on offer, we already have journalists arguing that it makes complete sense for Kylian Mbappe to take the cash for a year. The expectation that money matters most was already normalized before the Saudi’s started spending, they’re just playing by the rules set by idiots.

With the way football is heading, morally and financially, I’m reminded of a scene from In Bruges where Harry (played by Ralph Fiennes) says to Ken (played by Brendan Gleeson) that “I have the capacity to change” only for Ken to respond acerbically, “yeah, you have the capacity to get fucking worse” before Ken tells Harry that “you’re a cunt, and you always have been, and you’re only likely to become an even bigger cunt”.

So how much worse will it have to get before I quit doing this annual preview column? The predictability of Manchester City comfortably winning the league, and the same teams competing for the same goals as last season, is a significant turnoff. Brighton finishing sixth is as sexy as it gets these days. Watching club employees pigging out at the trough while doing it to benefit countries who carry out beheadings, limit freedoms to certain people and or pandering to a billionaire’s vanity is only getting more sickening. As is the sycophancy and hype afforded to those individuals running these clubs for spending vast sums of money and racking up debt. I watched less football last season than ever before, and I expect that trend to continue. Luton Town versus Fulham on a Tuesday night? Count me out. One thing keeps me returning, for now – it’s still somewhat amusing to chart how bad my predictions have been over the last ten years. One of these years I’ll get the Champions, top four (sorry, five now) and relegated teams all right. Just you watch!

Speaking of which, here are my predictions for relegation, the European positions and who’ll be champions (no surprises who I’m picking to win the league):

Relegation: Seeing quirky rickety Kenilworth Road host Premier League football, and serving as an anachronistic reminder of eighties football; condensed seating, obscured views, dodgy turnstiles, tight stairwells, toilets reeking of piss and shit, will be jarring when set against the gentrified modern soulless bowl stadiums that are now the norm, with their corporate seating, massive video screens and prawn sandwich stalls. It will be viewed as quaint to start. Some will make a phony connection that Luton’s highly visible comparative poverty brings the Premier League closer to the grassroots of the game, but it’ll last until September (or whenever the weather first turns) and probably be viewed as an eyesore for the gentrified image of football the Premier League brands itself on thereafter. Fortunately, they won’t have to put up with it for longer than eight months. Luton will finish bottom. They’re a League One team in talent. Derby’s record low point total of eleven will be threatened. Sheffield United to join them, they’re for sale and they’ve sold two of their best players from last year’s team, not added anything significant to their squad and their manager’s called Paul Heckingbottom. For the final relegation place? So many choices. Strong cases can be made for Wolves (their manager quit last week!), Bournemouth, Burnley and Nottingham Forest. But I can only pick one more and so I’ll go for Everton. They’re a logical pick as they’ve flirted with relegation in each of the last two seasons. The squad lacks goals, quality, depth, is reliant on too many over thirty players and is led by Sean Dyche, who utilises tactics that would’ve been viewed as outdated in 1964. Seems a perfect recipe for failure.

Top Four, sorry Five, and Thursday Night Wankers: Did you know that the top four is now the top five? Five Champions league qualifiers from England! Take that Brexit. Cause you jolly foreigners can’t control your borders, and allow all those brown people coming over the channel, Priti and Suella are getting immigrants on a barge, Lee Anderson (he’s really just angry because his son’s a vegetarian) is telling them to “fuck off back to France” and as fair recompense, we’ll send more of our yobs over than ever to trash your city centres.

Anyway, I digress. Despite becoming Thursday night wankers for the first time in six years, I expect Liverpool to finish second to Manchester City. They had a calamitous campaign last year and still nearly finished fourth. Manchester United third. Erik Ten Haag has made them somewhat reliable, like a spare tire and they’re equally as boring. Arsenal fourth, they’ve spent quite a bit of money and I’d rather still have United’s and Liverpool’s squads, that and their managers don’t remind me of a metrosexual cosplayer. Newcastle United should be in the mix for the Champions League places again, as much as I despise their sell out fans and manager, what they‘re doing from a team building standpoint is cogent. The opposite is Chelsea. What a mess. Despite spending roughly £700m (and counting) on players since Todd “Burger Me” Boehly took over last May, they still don’t have a centre forward I could pick out of a police lineup and they’re already on their third permanent manager during the last year (pour one out for Frank Lampard’s managerial career, he couldn’t even hack it as a reserve teacher, the fraud). Sixth, at best. Will Harry Kane remain with Spurs? It doesn’t matter. They’re shite with him and will be worse if and when he does finally free himself from purgatory. And anyway, if Kane does move to Bayern Munich, by moving to Germany he’s only doing what any sensible thirty-year-old living in the London area in 2023 would do. Aston Villa and Brighton should feel very confident of finishing above Chelsea or Spurs and snagging Europa League football.

Champions: Manchester City to win the league, and then the season after that, most likely. Picking anyone else is simply foolish. The question isn’t whether clubs backed by sovereign wealth will continue to win everything, it’s what they, in concert with the financial appeal of the Saudi Pro League, will do to the game’s already fraught finances.

Most importantly sportswashing of this scale further places matchgoing and local fans in an invidious position. The money generated from fans in the ground no longer correlates to the prosperity of the top clubs. The game’s mainly reliant on commercial, corporate or state wealth from outside your local area, and this is creating a disconnect that grows with each year. We recognize UEFA and the top European leagues, the Bundesliga aside, needed a nose punch, and that they had it coming thanks to their years of aggressive deregulation ceding power to clubs and allowing them to be run by bottom feeders and free market speculators or worse. That Saudi Arabia has arrived as the challenger is both a short-term reprieve and the worst possible long-term outcome. They’ve upped the ante, inflated the buddle further, when it needed bursting and the European game being knocked down by its own excesses. Instead, the Saudi’s will dish out a few split reputational lips and have cleared the credit card debt of the European bourgeoisie, allowing for a few more years of excess on the gravy train.