No More Top Down - Yale NUS

 After a few days of digging things up, some things have become a little clearer. The NUS administration closed the school down, and this decision was taken over the top of the president of Yale NUS. YNC would be merged with the University Scholars program to form the New College.

In many ways, Yale-NUS was a success. I thought that if it was going to fail, it would not be because of the students or the faculty. It would be a vibrant and intellectual community, professors would be in Singapore to do good work. There is a lot of new ground to be broken, especially when it comes to the academia on the East. Singapore is a confluence of the east and west. There are a few places whose existence serves to repudiate the Kipling saying about “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet”, Singapore is one of them, and maybe California is another one.

Unfortunately the Yale professors were right in the end. When they protested, I thought there was a whiff of racism. Maybe there was. Maybe there was more than a bit of sanctimonious righteousness about how they circulated a big resolution that tried to hold the Yale NUS college to account, to live up to the liberal values of the USA. This attitude is well summed up in the sarcastic comment that “there is virtually no country that can match the standard we set for the rest of the world when it comes to academic freedom and human rights”. There were points when I started wondering whether the scholars of Yale saw it as their mission to bring forth the liberal arts to the world, or to deny it to the rest of the world.

On one hand, the closure of the Yale-NUS college is a vindication of their belief that this project should not have started off in the first place. It now seems that one big issue is that it would be very hard to replicate a college like Yale in Singapore, with the values that Yale holds dear to their hearts. In fairness, Yale is already a fairly challenging environment to work in. It thrived in the 20^th century but it faces an existential crisis in the 21^st century – how is it going to fare in a world that is increasingly technologically advanced, in a world which is increasingly decolonised, where America's primacy is looking shaky. Does it hold fast to its values, or does it try to engage with the world which might have different values? And if it bends with the world, is it considered open-mindedness, or an unspeakable compromise? Yale University is a classic case of the innovator's dilemma.

And at the same time that Yale is already having a great clash of values, which is the confrontation between a new “woke” culture taking place on campuses and the great tradition of Yale, where it was one of the great cultural gatekeepers of the world in its heyday. At this time, you're being thrown a curveball by the university administrators, and you're told that some guys are going to open a beach head 12 hours away, and you got to train those soldiers to go forth and conquer, and the decisions behind this great civilising mission has taken place without your input. It's possible to sympathise with the faculty in this respect.

Personally what I found baffling is that Yale was handed a very good opportunity, a window into Asia, which was one of the most vibrant areas of the world today. It's one thing to turn up your nose at failed states and say, you have failed. If the rise of Asia does not make you start pondering the universality of some of those liberal values, you have insufficient intellectual curiosity to call yourself a scholar.

More damningly, the attitude of the faculty has hung a cloud over the whole enterprise. It's arguable that the lack of enthusiasm amongst the faculty for this project was the first nail in the coffin. I don't know about the reaction amongst the faculty for the demise of this project: it's not good form to celebrate the death of an enterprise when you are one of the reasons for the death of this enterprise.

Yet you probably need to take a walk around New Haven to start asking yourself in what manner Yale University has been a benefit to its immediate urban environment. Do I want Singapore to look like that, you wonder.

Arranged marriages are not necessarily doomed. I feel for the students and faculty of the Yale NUS college. They set about their mission with revolutionary zeal, and they believed they were building something that would last through the ages.

On one hand, you could say that they were good kids, and they were intellectually curious about the world, and in many ways built a vibrant community that is a credit to themselves and their upbringing.

On the other hand, when you asked them, “what could you do in Yale-NUS that you couldn't have done elsewhere”, they might not have a clue. Yes, they would have to compromise in an environment like the wider NUS, but NUS has some kind of academic freedom that apparently the Yale-NUS people, living in their bubble of freedom, is apparently unaware of. This is the 21^st century, the era of the internet. It is impossible for Yale-NUS to be opening your mind up to ideas and viewpoints that you couldn't find anywhere else.

To the extent that they are mourning for the devaluation of their parchment, it's hard to feel sympathy for them. I think this was something the NUS faculty was counting on, that the resentment that the wider community, and NUS feels towards them might defray some of the flak that would greet the decision to discontinue the Yale name. Are the alumni mourning this wonderful, beautiful bubble world where having “Yale” attached to your name unlocks special lifelong privileges? I have myself experienced this, having graduated from Snowy Hill and imagining that for the rest of my life, I would be shrouded in some melancholy glory, bemoaning the burdens that these privileges have imposed upon me and pondering over the darker side of fame and fortune. It might have been the way for some of my peers but apparently that didn't happen to me.

People might forget that it's Yale's ties with NUS which have died. Whether the values of the liberal arts in Singapore have died is still very much a matter of active debate, and it is always up for some kind of negotiation. This is a matter of half a glass full or half a glass empty. On one hand, Yale-NUS is shut down as an entity. On the other hand, there is a big project under way to use the experience from Yale-NUS to change the way that NUS is being run. A lot of things are still up in the air. I'm not on the ground to say exactly what has come to an end, but there are plenty of battles that lie ahead, waiting to be fought, and really, not the time for funerals.

Some people may bemourn that Yale-NUS represented some kind of a “safe space” for them. That reminds me of a saying: Art Should Comfort the Disturbed and Disturb the Comfortable. You are meant to have a nuanced relationship with safe spaces. Safe spaces are good and they allow you to thrive, but it should never allow you to be so comfortable that you're never going to step away from them. Is it a good thing that you have a safe space in Yale-NUS, and is that taking the best and the brightest of your cohort and building their character up? Should elite higher education be about cotton candy and warm, inviting collegiate cushy spaces? No outsider is going to shed tears if that's what's getting taken away.

What it now seems to be the case is that Singapore is enamoured of Yale's ability to foster multi-disciplinary scholarship, and to conduct enquiries of knowledge that span across traditional boundaries between departments. They may or may not love the academic freedom that comes about as a result of this process, or is essential to this process. But they most certainly cannot deal with the student activism that would find a place on Yale University. What seems to be the case is NUS wants to forge a new model: they want the fruits of interdisciplinary collaboration, and yet they want the control over society that they've always had. This is unprecedented, but there's no real reason why it wouldn't really work. Singapore has always been this case study that pluralism can go hand in hand with half-assed political freedom. And Singapore is starting to pose this question to the rest of the world: perhaps some restriction on personal liberties is necessary to ensure this pluralism can continue to exist without some kind of major strife.

The other unedifying aspect of this saga is that there are plenty of precedents for Singapore higher education to tie up with a big name from overseas – most likely America. They will leverage this big name to attract hungry and eager scholars from around the region – and make no mistake, the one thing that Asia won't ever be short of is people. And they will dangle this big name to attract them to plant their roots down, and bootstrap this big academic initiative. Somewhere along the line, they will seize control of the enterprise and run it exactly the way they want it.

Then again, if you think that only Singapore is guilty of making universities whose prestige rides upon that of a more ancient entity, consider how Harvard University is in a town called Cambridge.

In the case of Yale, you certainly could accuse them of pulling off this shady move. At the same time, you would also have to admit that, right from the get-go, it is really hard to have Yale's name on this project when the Yale faculty simply bochap. The interactions between Yale and Yale-NUS are as awkward as your average episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm”.

You don't really want to be in a position of having killed off Yale's ties to a project that is in many ways a promising one, simply because you were intransigent about not working with a bunch of people who don't share your values. And yet at the same time, it would be a really curious thing if the Singapore government were to rethink the entire values system of our society simply because they wanted to accommodate the Yale-NUS people. It's very often cited that Singapore has that colonial era 377A on their books, but what's lost is the sheer complexity of this issue as it is seen on the ground, that this issue is a frontier in one of the most contentious political battles in Singapore.

At the same time, in the previous blog post I made on this topic, I touched on how a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since the last time this Yale-NUS topic was debated. Since then, Singapore's trajectory towards a more liberal path has halted and turned around. A higher level of political liberalisation has become less desirable. The US has been seen as being less desirable as a model for the rest of the world.

You could make a case that political activism in the university is an essential rite of passage towards adulthood, or is just so much gawky and fumbling performatory political activism that's painful to watch. Is Singapore's political space large enough to accommodate that? I'm thinking of the US as a place where the four factions (smart / just / free / real) are co-existing in the same space, and I'm wondering if we want that for Singapore. It's nice to yearn for a little bit of political liberalisation in Singapore, but how do we deal with the forces unleashed when everybody's glove comes off?

At the same time, this is 2020, and we are in a pandemic. We can clearly see that mask mandates and vaccine mandates are illiberal measures to take, but we accept them because they are good for society. That goes against the spirit of the thinking that a community which is more politically open is necessarily a more intelligent and highly functioning society. It's easy to laugh at the people who invoke freedom and "doing your own research" as the reason why mask mandates are being defied. But it's not so easy to accept that for many people and in many ways, they are doing the illiberal things, such as accepting a higher level of government surveillance, and this has resulted in a lot of lives being saved.

Closure (or rather "merger") of Yale- NUS

 In another lifetime, I somehow recall writing about Yale NUS. Now that that experiment is finally over, let's have another look back at it. 

I don't really know why Yale-NUS decided to close down, but this has become such an interesting topic, and not least because of all the water that's flowed under the bridge since there were the great debates about the formation of Yale-NUS. 

Since then, there have been a series of events that for various reasons changed the whole equation on this question:

1. Worsening of relations between US and China

From the end of the Cold war on, America has taken the attitude that we live in an increasingly open world, and that the US was the leader of this increasingly open world. It accepted a lot of scholars from around the world to their universities, and many of them have risen up to be world class researchers. 

But with the rivalry between the US and China heating up, many in the US education system are starting to question if this openness were such a great thing after all: it seemed as though it was just a massive transfer of technology from the US to eager Chinese students. 

This is probably more relevant to the state of STEM education. But it's also true that there may not have been a lot of enthusiasm amongst the Yale faculty, especially where working with Singapore were concerned. There have been concerns about the government interfering with the work of the academics in Yale NUS. 

Most branches of study are not Asian studies, and they don't always touch on what's going on in the rest of the humanities. It would be nice to start looking at political philosophy from a Confucian point of view, but don't expect Yale to drift too far away from the western-centric perspective anytime soon.

10 years ago, the curiosity of the US universities towards Chinese culture was at its peak. Since then, the mood has soured rapidly, and yet, this is a period of time when it's been more important than ever before for the US academic system to get a grip on what China is all about, on Chinese culture. You do see several universities on the West Coast becoming more engaged with Asia, and somehow Yale is not actively moving in this direction, and you do have to ask yourself why. 

2. Rise of MOOCs

What's also happened is that you could get an education by listening to online lectures. This was a relatively new development, that's happened since the creation of Yale-NUS. I don't really know what this portends for the university as a business model. But I know that the days where the university as the gatekeeper of knowledge is, for most intents and purposes, over. 

The problem with offering the social sciences as majors is that a lot of what you can learn can also be learned with access to a good library. They are nebulous, and it is hard to judge how good people are at their subject. Maybe a guy like LKY might be a genius at it, given that he's been shown to be right about a lot of things. But unfortunately you can only write essays, and people can mark you on how well essays are written, and it can be a little hard to gauge whether you've really learnt anything at all. 

The worst thing is that you would be paying a lot of tuition, roughly the same amount as for a STEM education, and your earning potential would not be highly enhanced by your degree. In many ways, it is a great education, but I don't know how you'd assess it once money comes into the picture.

3. Liberal arts or Big Science University

What NUS wanted to get a flavour of is how you could integrate together the various fields of study to build a wide-ranging education and whether there were cross linkages between the different departments, that could make for the more multi-disciplinary inquiry of knowledge, as well as a better richness of intellectual life. I suppose all this was the basis of a liberal education. 

This may have something to do with my choosing tech as my field, even though as an undergraduate I had more of a liberal arts background. But I notice that a lot of the research that has changed the world is taking place in the tech fields. There is a place for economics and politics and these are very important fields of study, but they tend to be reactive to the way that tech has changed our society. 

I'm probably out of the loop where Yale is concerned, but I'm not really aware of how Yale has advanced human knowledge recently. Historians very often do not advance human knowledge. They reconsider opinions that have been put forth before, and historians are very often revising peoples' opinions about important events in the past. There is a lot of rethinking, re-contextualising, reconsidering. But should it be a badge of pride that you excel in the classics? 

People might think of the study of cyberspace as some kind of new-fangled academic discipline, but it's not. The internet has become such an important part of our lives that you can no longer think about society functioning without it. And yet we still live like we're 30 or 50 years behind time. So much of the established history and literature deals with the 60s or the 80s, and these were the eras where the canonical events that shaped our understanding of the world took place. 

I made the point that many of the Ivy League universities made the big mistake of not developing their engineering departments, preferring instead to emphasise the sciences and the arts. A liberal arts education is something that might be good at producing some of the visionaries in society, the poets, the artists, the philosophers who try to nail down what makes a good life a good life. But it probably won't produce the cutting edge in tech, and won't produce the workers that make up your industry. Or it might have these benefits, but it won't show them in a tangible way. 

At the same time, the Singapore government has to think about a larger question, regarding the role of the university in society. A liberal arts education in the US is widely admired, but it's role in the US having the greatest university system in the world might be a bit more murky. 

The US ascended to the ranks of the greatest university system in the world, partly because big projects enabled the big universities to achieve great technological advancements in real life. This is the essence of innovation: not merely having bright people with creative ideas, but also the ability to execute the process of bringing them forth into real life. 

There was a time when there was more active co-ordination between the US government and academia. These days, with the libertarian free market ideas having taken hold, a lot of this has become patchy. People are starting to believe that governments shouldn't direct large research programs, and simply let serendipidity and chance to do what it will. And somehow people believe that private enterprises, whose ostensible interest is to further their own ability to keep on making money, and whose interests are not even supposed to be aligned with the country where they are incorporated, holds the key to producing great research for the nation in the future. 

What does all this have to do with the liberal arts? I don't really know. As great as I found the liberal arts experience to be, I also noticed that it wasn't the locus for knowledge discovery in the tech era. It's great for teaching, it's great for soapbox preaching, it's great for a young mind to grasp and make sense of the world, but it's not technological advancement. 

4. Crisis of democracy in the USA

American universities are going through some kind of crisis of their own. There are the four tribes that were outlined by George Packer. Smart America, Just America, Real America and Free America. Free America might have a tetchy relationship with universities. Smart America and Just America are probably the two tribes which are closes to the American university. While there's never been anything wrong about the quest for social justice, of late people have sounded more bolshevik, and taken offense over some of the craziest things. Some of the moderation that's characterised the best of how intellectual inquiry should take place in a free society has been lost. 

Campus activity has been more and more politicised, and not necessarily in a good way. We've had people from Yale fighting over Halloween costumes and tearing down statues. The US is going through a crisis that makes people wonder whether the much vaunted system of democracy is worth emulating. One of the most important test beds of democracy is the university. (Well, at least free speech is something that's supposed to be sacrosanct in the university. In many ways, universities are not democratic places). There are very important reasons why free speech is supposed to exist in a university. 

Free speech in a university challenges people to make up their minds and form their own opinions. It is a rite of passage for university students. Free speech challenges students to come into contact with opinions they feel uncomfortable with and resolve them in a mature manner. 

5. Clashes of culture

MIT has managed to make a big tie-up with Singapore's engineering work, because it's a less broad-based collaboration. It was just a few academic departments, and it's always easier to get engineers to agree on things together. Same with the Duke-NUS medical school tie-up. It's very easy to collaborate with somebody else in research. You do it all the time, regardless of whether you've formalised your relationship. Research is like jazz, you should be able to play well with just about anybody else who plays jazz. (Otherwise you wouldn't be a jazzman). IT's not so much of a big deal for Duke medical to have a tie up with NUS medical school, or MIT to have a tie-up with NUS engineering. 

But a liberal arts school is something altogether. For starters, liberal arts is not one academic unit, but maybe 50 different academic departments. And the boundaries between the academic departments are even more fluid than if they were engineering departments. Becoming a liberal arts college demands that you not only change how research is done, but also how teaching is done: your administration has to be more flexible, you have to do more to accede to the needs of the individual, and you have to accept that sometimes, people might just coast through and take advantage of the flexibility to do the minimum required to get through their degree. Liberal arts degrees are in many ways less rigorous. Is NUS prepared to accept that? 

6. Rise of the opposition parties

Since the 2011 election, the opposition parties have made strides into the political scene. The PAP has suddenly become quite vulnerable. That's the great paradox of Singapore politics: it is an authoritarian government, albeit one that could in theory be voted out in any general elections. 

GE2011 probably took place in a 5 year period during which Singapore was experimenting with looser political control. During the aftermath of GE 2011, a lot of civil society activity was sprouting up everywhere, and I don't really know if that shifted the mood on the thinking of the PAP. The PAP then pulled out all the stops, first with the 50th anniversary of independence in 2015, (nicely coinciding with the death of LKY – he always has a good sense of timing). Then there was the kerfuffle with 38 Oxley, which at least demonstrates to the whole world that the second Lee was not above requisitioning his own house to use as an instrument of political propaganda. Coupled with the unprecedented Malaysia election results which showed Patakan Harapan finally wresting power away from Barisan National for the first time ever, this is the setting behind the Singapore government's recent push to get a tighter grip on political subversion in Singapore. 

It might shift the needle on the government's thinking, that perhaps it's not good to grant a university too much freedom. Of course, a liberal arts university doesn't necessarily mean you have liberal or anti-government politics. Having a more well-rounded and broader liberal arts education on paper should be a completely separate issue from how outspoken you are in society at large. But liberal arts means you have more leeway, more latitude, and less shackles imposed upon the manner in which you pursue education. In some sense, liberal education is political freedom. 

7. COVID-19 pandemic

There's also the case that COVID-19 has changed the business environment regarding the sustainability of university, and liberal arts colleges were especially hard hit. For a mode of operations that necessitates a lot of face time between students and professors, liberal arts colleges are going to suffer inordinately as a result of having to conduct zoom classes. 

And add to that, there's the pressure of having to link up with the Yale side in the middle of a pandemic with a lot of travel restrictions. And add to that the pressures surrounding the breaking down of relations between the US and China. 

So I previously focused on why a lot of Yale's objections to Yale-NUS are specious and ill-founded, but I hadn't actually gone down to really think about how much Singapore needs a liberal arts education. 

How much does Singapore need a liberal arts college? 

For that matter, since the US higher education system itself is undergoing some kind of a flux, what is the future of liberal arts education?

How much should the US keep on opening campus branches abroad? Do they benefit Yale, do they benefit Singapore, how much better would Singapore be if it tried to pursue the idea of liberal education by going it alone? 

So there are all sorts of possibilities about why NUS severed its relationship with Yale in Yale-NUS. I'll list them out here because, frankly, I don't know any better, and to be fair to people so that we can all consider the scope of our discussion.

1. Yale-NUS never had the buy-in from the Yale faculty.

2. The faculty complained about Singapore being “too authoritarian” / “not American”. Or maybe the mood has been somewhat soured. Or maybe decolonisation never ever did mean shit.

3. NUS was unable to accede to the requirements of running a liberal arts college, perhaps on a public university's budget?

4. It's demeaning to NUS that you need the Yale name in order to make the college prestigious enough to join.

5. It's demeaning to Yale that “Yale” has been reduced to no more than a brand name.

6. NUS was resisting the demands to increase the synergies between the departments.

7. NUS (maybe also the Singapore Government) was sick and tired of having to foot the bill.

8. Yale-NUS was potentially a hotspot for dissident political activity

9. NUS had already obtained the expertise from Yale and knew how to carry on running a liberal arts college.

10. Or, NUS, having seen what it means to run a liberal arts college, has decided that it's just not worth the bother, and has decided to go back to a one-size-fits-all approach. 

11. There is tension between a smaller start-up and its parent organisation (NUS is basically the parent since Yale is basically the deadbeat dad). 

12. Yale NUS students are simply inferior to the ones in Yale. 

Of these, I'm not willing to make any comment on whether or not it's true, other than the last point, which I believe is simply not true. 

Somebody remarked that notwithstanding possibly the higher selectivity of people applying to Yale (through the front door, at least) the students in Yale NUS were as good as, if not better than the ones at Yale. (This is contentious, because a lot of the time, when somebody has a worldview different from yours, and you're just trying to keep up with it, it can make him seem like he's very smart). And furthermore, unlike Yale University, Yale-NUS does not have legacy admits. 

Competitive advantage of Premier League Teams

 I still remember the early days of the English Premier League. Leeds United were the first defending champion. Man U's first rival for the title was Aston Villa, and it was not a given that it would win the title: they were breaking a title drought almost as long as Liverpool's 30 years.

After Man U won 4 titles in 5 years, it seemed that they were set for a period of utter dominance. Blackburn won the one title they missed during those 5 years, but they failed to establish a dynasty, after Jack Walker's money ran out and Kenny Dalglish quit. Newcastle United could have established a dynasty, but Kevin Keegan lost his nerve and quit. Kenny Dalglish took over from him and also failed to establish Newcastle as a top club.

This was the cue for Arsenal to storm to the top of English league. Blackburn Rovers were probably similar to what Liverpool would have been if Graeme Souness had not messed it up. But Arsenal, who should have been an above average club, spent the next 7 seasons wrestling with Man United for supremacy in the English Premier League. That's because they brought something totally different to the table.

At this point in time, the roles of 3 clubs should be highlighted: Middlesborough were a club who thought they could build a great dynasty. They hired Bryan Robson as a manager, convinced that he was destined to be a great manager. Then they signed Fabrizio Ravanelli, Juninho and Emerson, thinking they could play sexy football. That didn't work: they spent 1 season in the top flight, and reached the 2 cup finals, lost them both and were relegated at the end of the season. But they were one club who spearheaded the transition of the English Premier League into something more cosmopolitan.

Another club which attempted this was Chelsea, and they had more success. They brought in Ruud Gullit and got him to be the manager. They brought in Gianfranco Zola, Gianluca Vialli, Roberto Di Matteo, Dan Petrescu and Frank Lebouef. They were the first major side with a major foreign contigent.

But Arsenal topped them off by having a team whose core was practically foreign. Bergkamp and Anelka in front, Vieira and Petiti in the middle. A lot of the best players from Rioch's and Graham's time at the club were retained and Wenger brought out the best from them: the famous back four of Adam, Bould, Dixon and Winterburn. David Seaman, Ian Wright, Paul Merson and Ray Parlour.

Arsene Wenger brought several new innovations to the club, like improved nutrition and sports science and better scouting networks. For a while, he was very good at developing youth players, if you considered Thierry Henry and Patrick Vieira to be youths. Between 2001 and 2004 they were undisputably the best team in the land, if you overlooked how they inexplicably let Man U in to steal the title from them in 2003.

Unfortunately those years would never be repeated. The greatest achievement of Man U was that they outlasted many of their rivals – Leeds, Aston Villa, Blackburn Rovers, Newcastle, Arsenal, and even Chelsea.

Arsenal's astounding success during Arsene Wenger's first decade in charge was due to his introducing new ideas that weren't yet adopted by everybody. There's a small window of time when relatively small clubs can change the world and vastly outperform themselves. Consider that the first few big clubs in the English league were Preston, Sunderland and Aston Villa. Eventually, it makes sense that a club situated in the middle of a vast football heartland would dominate. Eventually it would not be a surprise that the biggest clubs of the Manchester – Liverpool region would be the biggest clubs of all, and the satellite towns – Bolton, Blackburn, Burnley, Preston – would just fade away.

Or think about how Holland were briefly the greatest football country in the world when they invented total football, and how Ajax Amsterdam dominated the European Cup in the early 1970s.

For a while, Bolton Wanderers would have some astounding level of success, reaching the top 10 4 times in a row, and that's because of a data revolution, or Sam Allardyce's methods of managing – signing aging stars who can no longer cut it at the highest level, but would excel in a mid-table team, practicing set pieces, and being ultra-defensive.

Chelsea Football club changed English football in a big way: there had always been rich sides that were bankrolled by big patrons, but this was the time when the millionaires transitioned into the billionaires. This would be the beginning of plutocrat football, of football clubs being billionaire playthings. To be sure, AC Milan in the previous decade in a way bought their success, but that was balanced out by Arrigo Sacchi being a genuine football innovator. Abramovich's entry into the arena was the beginning of the end of football being a people's game. It would eventually become an ogilopoly of the biggest clubs, and smaller clubs would eventually be shut out forever. In fact, Leicester City's famous league win would be celebrated because it was a millionaire's club, not a billionaire's club.

Chelsea Football club would have a new trick up its sleeve: the billionaire owner. When he hired Jose Mourinho, who would annihilate the rest of the league with a combination of having the most expensive players and parking the bus. It wasn't that straightforward: the first year, Hernan Crespo Veron, Wayne Bridge and Adrian Mutu joined the club, and these did not turn out to be great players for the club.

When a rich owner takes over the club, there are a variety of outcomes. There could be a short-lived bump in fortunes, as was the case for Newcastle and Blackburn, when their sponsors were tired of them. There were other clubs which had short-lived sponsors. FC Anzhi Makhachkala were a spectacular example, when they spent lavishly on Samuel Eto'o's salary for 1 year, before deciding they were done with this toy. Middlesborough were supposed to be the next big thing, but they could hardly establish themselves in the premier league. There was a time when Aston Villa and Everton were aiming to be an established part of the Big 4 but neither of them really made that leap. And let's not forget that period of time when Sheffield Wednesday, Bradford, Ipswich and most infamously, Leeds spent beyond their means and all of them became insolvent.

There was this persistent question of how Chelsea would continue to maintain their dominance after the first few years of success. Apparently Roman Abramovich is still interested in funding the club after all these years, and anyway they managed to bootstrap themselves into some kind of real football operation, as opposed to other instances when a rich sponsor has just split and left the club in a bust.

I think that one of the greatest achievements of Alex Ferguson was that he managed to claw his empire back after Arsenal and then Chelsea threatened to knock him off his perch. There were years of dodgy acquisitions, like Eric Djemba Djemba, Roy Carroll, Veron, Quinton Fortune, Laurent Blanc. Somehow, he hit a purple patch of good players, getting in Evra, Rooney, Ronaldo, Vidic, Saha and Van Der Sar. Michael Owen and Owen Hargreaves were good players when fit, which is never.

The titles that Man U won in 2011 and 2013 probably were not considered part of his third great team. IT was probably a transition period between the fall of Man U and the rise of Man City. But some of the great players from that side were still there. They grabbed a Van Persie still at the height of his powers.

There are clubs that somehow manage to overperform relative to their means and spending, and that is because they bring something special to the table. Maybe they have special methods and techniques. Arsenal's superpower was their free-wheeling attacking style, better scouting and better nutrition and fitness. However, these advantages were neutralised with time, and it's probably a testament to Arsene Wenger's ability as a coach that up to 10 years after the dismantling of the invincibles side, he still managed to be able to get the club into the Champion's league year after year. That said, the overwhelming feeling was that they had hit a ceiling and they would never break that ceiling of squeaking into the top 4 and getting knocked out of the round of 16 year after year. When their stranglehold on the champion's league place lapsed, especially after losing out to Leicester City for a league title, there was nowhere to go but down.

When a club loses a big chunk of its special power, it could go into a downward spiral. Arsenal does not have many conspicuous advantages – it used to be an over-performing club, and now it's regressed to the mean, and maybe it's still expected to be an over-performing club. Maybe this is why its relationship with the fans has become so toxic.

Manchester United's special power is their fanbase and Alex Ferguson. For a while, even with the Glazers in charge, Manchester United still managed to be very successful. And this was because their previous success bought them a fanbase that they could rely on to have a healthy transfer kitty. But with the departure of Alex Ferguson, one of the wheels would fall off.

Liverpool is another club that could punch above their weight, owing to their history. Their other superpower, allegedly responsible for anywhere up to 6 of their European trophies, is how Anfield is a ground that no opposing team really wants to play in. Perhaps they also got lucky with their recruitment, when the great 2009 edition had Mascherano, Gerrard, Torres, Reina and Xabi Alonso in their team. Or the 2014 edition that had Raheem Sterling, Daniel Sturridge and Luis Suarez. Jurgen Klopp has done a great job with Liverpool leading up to the pandemic. They managed to win the Champion's League and the league, and narrowly miss out on a league title in spite of finishing with more than 95 points. But the pandemic will deprive them of the full power of Anfield, and also you feel that a natural cycle has ended: there were signs of fatigue in the 20/21 season, even if they did manage a heroic effort to get into the champion's league place.

Or even consider Tottenham Hotspur, who got lucky a few times, when they got players like Luca Modric, Berbatov and Gareth Bale. Where they got very lucky was with the appointment of Mauricio Pochettino as a coach. He implemented a hard running and intensely physical style of play that got Tottenham into the Champion's league places for a few years running. Then eventually, his team succumbed to burn out, and for some strange reason, Daniel Levy fired him. Well I'm not sure when if ever Tottenham will get back into the champion's league places but I'm not holding my breath.

One really interesting club is Leicester City, and maybe the Thai owners are really smart. They started off trying to get Sven Goran Eriksson as their coach, and fired him after that didn't work. Then they got Nigel Pearson who got Leicester promoted and then saved them from relegation in the EPL. Then somehow they got Leicester to win the EPL in the next season. After a few missteps in the wake of that unlikely triumph, they got Brendan Rodgers as manager, and he's kept them in the Europa league places ever since, and they might have a good tilt at the Champion's League places.

Now, we'll come to the plutocrats. Chelsea's superpower is their ruthlessness. I don't really know how Chelsea managed to get around the financial fair play rules, but it seems that they're one of the big clubs and they can get whoever they want. They're a bit like Real Madrid: they're not going to be cuddly or loveable, but they'll find a way to win trophies, and they'll sack their manager at a drop of a hat. It seems to work. They grabbed Jose Mourinho once he left Real Madrid, and he managed to get them 1 league title. Then he faltered the next season, and he had to go, and Conte managed another league title, then Conte had to go. Then there was another rebuilding to be done, and while there was a transfer embargo going on, they got Frank Lampard to do a job, and he did a relatively OK job of getting them into a champion's league place. And when Chelsea were again able to get more players in, for whatever reason, Frank Lampard wasn't able to get them to gel, and that was the cue for him to get fired and for Thomas Tuchel to take his place. Thomas Tuchel has done well so far, getting Chelsea into the Champion's League places, the FA Cup final and winning the Champion's league. It's not easy to have any kind of success at all when it seems that Man City is hoarding all the trophies, but

And that leaves us Man City. I don't know how they get around the financial fair play rules. I'm thinking that if they were allowed to participate in the Champion's league, instead of being banned for a year.... to be sure, Man City had spent lavishly on players in the past, but not really during Guardiola's time. There were big purchases for players, to be sure, and there was a very very good player in every position, but they were not going to break the bank for a real star, and in some ways, that's because football has become less individualistic and star oriented. But they could be acquiring Harry Kane and Jack Grealish in the same season and that could change.

They've been absolutely ruthless since Pep Guardiola cracked the code of building a winning EPL team. There are some people who say that Pep Guardiola could not manage a lower league team, and that he would flounder trying to impose his high-falutin ideas on lesser players. That may be true, but he's not supposed to work with lesser teams, he's supposed to get into the seat at an elite team, and use all the other teams to mop the floor.

He came out of nowhere... I only took notice of Pep Guardiola when he kicked Man U's ass in the 2009 champion's league final. He had barely been in charge of Barcelona when they did the double, and his work had almost immediate impact. He had basically gained that “unfair advantage” that Arsenal had during their glory days, and for the next few years, Barcelona were basically unbeatable. But they won't always be unbeatable, and they won't always have a bumper crop of great players from La Masia. Chelsea and Man City have bottomless pits of money, and somehow they can still build great youth teams.

Man City basically went about courting nobody but him... they put his name right on the seat. Mancini and Pellegrini were basically just warming up the seat for him. Barcelona proved to be too stressful for him to manage, and for whatever reason he couldn't settle at Bayern Munich, so he ended up at Man City. And that gives them an almost unfair advantage by marrying vast resources with a great genius.

Rich people become owners / chairmen of top English clubs for various reasons, but some do it to pump money in and others do it to pump money out. Man City, Chelsea and PSG are clubs which are bankrolled by oil money. On the other hand, Man U and Arsenal started off as big clubs, and then the takeovers have been similar to leveraged buyouts. You pile the debt onto the club, get the club to service the debt, and at the end of the day, you bilk the money from the club.

And then there are still other rich owners of clubs, I don't know what they do it for. They know that they aren't going to win anything with a mid table club, and still they buy it as some kind of a rich man's plaything. Perhaps it's for branding purposes? I don't know why the Venky's group bought Blackburn Rovers. It hasn't been a viable brand name since the relegation just a few years after winning the title.