The BBC’s Phil McNulty served up his annual season review this week, and it reads like a corporate press release dressed in tweed—a sanitised institutional failure that glosses over the systemic rot, financial doping, and competitive rot that turned the 2023-24 Premier League into a farce of VAR chaos, points deductions, and a title race decided by which club’s lawyers wrote the best compliance manual.
McNulty’s glowing appraisal of Manchester City’s fourth consecutive title conveniently sidesteps the 115 Premier League charges hanging over the Etihad like a guillotine blade. He praised Pep Guardiola’s tactical tweaks and Erling Haaland’s relentless finishing, but never once asked the uncomfortable question: does a victory lap before those charges are adjudicated devalue the very trophy? Everton and Nottingham Forest each suffered in-season points deductions for breaching Profit and Sustainability Rules—Forest docked four points for miscalculating a transfer window, Everton whacked with two separate penalties totalling eight points. Meanwhile, City play on, unpunished, as the Premier League’s own disciplinary process staggers into its third year. McNulty called the title race “compelling” without naming the elephant in the room: the competition is only compelling if you believe the playing field is level. It isn’t.
The review also whitewashed the chaos on the pitch. He noted the drama of Liverpool’s final season under Jürgen Klopp, but omitted the collapse of the VAR system that made a mockery of consistency. When Luis Díaz’s clear goal at Tottenham was disallowed by an offside check that never happened, the league didn’t fix the process—it simply blamed human error. McNulty’s season summary treated VAR as a minor irritant rather than a structural failure that affected relegation battles and Champions League places. He wrote glowingly of Aston Villa’s fourth-place finish under Unai Emery, yet failed to mention that Villa benefited from two of the season’s most egregious VAR howlers—including a phantom offside against Bournemouth that cost the Cherries a vital point in their own survival fight. The review mentions the “drama” of the relegation scrap, but barely scratches the surface of how Luton Town, a club with a stadium capacity of 11,000, had to survive on a fraction of the budget while Chelsea, finishing 12th, spent £400 million and still finished ten points above the drop.
McNulty concluded his piece with a patronising “we’ll never see another season like this” that ignores the obvious trajectory: the Premier League is not a chaotic outlier—it is a system designed to reward the few and punish the many, with referees, regulators, and broadcasters all complicit. The real verdict is this: until the charges against City are resolved, until VAR is held accountable, until points deductions apply equally to the billion-pound clubs and the provincial survivors, every season review from a BBC chief writer will be nothing more than a sanitised alibi for a broken game. Next season, when City lift another title under a cloud of unresolved allegations, McNulty will call it “brilliant” again. I’ll call it what it is: a charade with a corporate sponsor.