Victory to the Millennials: This Weekend in the Premier League

They say that football is a game of opinions, but it's probably more accurate to say that football teams themselves are like opinions, in that a) they're more trouble than they're worth; b) changing them is problematic; and c) liking a bad one will see you lose a huge amount of respect among your peers.

Thankfully, this column is the only place that you can get pure, certifiable good opinions on the football, or at least all this weekend’s action in the Premier League.

When David Moyes, Roy Hodgson and Sam Allardyce were appointed earlier in the season, it caused something of a generational divide in the world of football. While young, hip, gegenpressing aficionados generally bemoaned the staleness of the appointments – the lack of new ideas, excitement and risk-taking, the vague parochialism of it all – the traditionalists of the game hailed the British old guard's pragmatic genius and foresaw great success.

Yes, Allardyce had alienated more fans than he'd drunk pints of wine, Moyes was relegated with Sunderland last season and Hodgson had presided over England’s most humiliating major tournament ever, but a few bad years doesn’t trump decades of experience, or so the traditionalists would have it. Where succulent-owning, kombucha-drinking millennials might have wanted the latest fashionista European manager – 30-year-old Hoffenheim boss Julian Nagelsmann, for instance, with his working understanding of a laptop and newfangled 3-1-4-2 formation – they would be no substitute for full-blooded, red-white-and-blue football men of the "proper" sort.

Having had several months each in their current jobs, it currently looks like the millennial naysayers are winning this round in the game of opinions. After briefly giving the traditionalists hope with a bump in results, Everton are 20th in the table for shots, shots on target and chances created; West Ham have won one in five – including Saturday’s 4-1 defeat to relegation rivals Swansea – and Crystal Palace are in the relegation zone pending their meeting with Manchester United on Monday night. Paul Lambert and Alan Pardew, two more hugely experienced Brits, are also in the bottom three, having failed to inspire even a brief upswing. Maybe the Eurocentric youth know their stuff after all.

"That was such a hard watch. That was anti-football, that was a crime against football what they did today."

This was the verdict of Jamie Redknapp regarding Chelsea's 1-0 loss to Manchester City at the Etihad. Now, nobody is claiming Chelsea were good on Sunday: according to Opta, they failed to register a single shot in the first half of a Premier League game for the first time since the 2003/04 season, while most onlookers seemed to agree that the match was absolutely dismal. That said, were you to ask an Arsenal fan whether they’d take a 1-0 defeat to City after back-to-back 3-0 thrashings last week, they’d probably kill for the relative mercy of losing by a single goal while playing without a recognised striker.

Sometimes, when an opponent is as good as City are right now, a team has to settle for a 1-0 loss aided by a turgid form of anti-football. It’s appalling to watch but, unlike the florid rubbish Arsenal served up in the League Cup final and at the Emirates on Thursday, it preserves a certain sense of pride and self-worth. Jamie Redknapp is not necessarily a man to lecture on saving face, given the fact he was once run the entire length of the pitch for a Thierry Henry goal and then forced to relive it in the Sky studio for banter. When it's a choice between being horribly embarrassed or losing in ugly but respectable fashion, the majority of football fans instinctively know what’s worse.

If there is one person you have to feel for more than anyone else involved in the current Arsenal debacle, it's Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang. Sure, he's a multi-millionaire who’s probably wealthier and happier than 99.999 percent of people, but in the context of his career he must be wondering why the fuck he agreed to move to north London.

This is a man who was reportedly a target for AC Milan, Liverpool and various minted clubs in China, but who got an offer from Arsenal and probably thought: yeah, that’s a pretty big club, they get the best out of strikers, they went Invincible that time and, say what you will about Arsene Wenger, they’re stable. A month later and he's doing his best to score goals in a team which has imploded to the point where they can take encouragement from a creditable 2-1 defeat to Brighton. If Arsenal go out of the Europa League to Milan later in the month – one of the clubs Aubameyang supposedly could have joined – his will have officially been the worst-timed transfer of all time.

Politics and football can be a combustible combination at the best of times, but especially when the former is treated with ham-fisted ineptitude. That was precisely how Martin Glenn reacted to Pep Guardiola's political views this weekend, when his response to the City manager wearing a yellow ribbon in solidarity with arrested Catalan independence politician went thus: "We have rewritten Law Four of the game so that things like a poppy are OK but things that are going to be highly divisive are not. That could be strong religious symbols – it could be the Star of David, it could the hammer and sickle, it could be a swastika, anything like Robert Mugabe on your shirt. These are the things we don’t want."

This looks awfully like equating Pep’s yellow ribbon with Nazism (Glenn also went on to mention UKIP and ISIS), which is very unfortunate.

Rule of thumb: the problem with lumping all political ideas together is that not all of them have equal merit. So, wearing a ribbon to protest against a repressive crackdown in Catalonia ≠ the world-renowned symbol for international fascism. You’d think the chief executive of the Football Association would understand this, but then the FA is probably too busy signing its latest partnership with Qatar to worry too much about politics.

@W_F_Magee