There was a good story at the start of this week’s BT Sport documentary Too Good To Go Down, a highly watchable 90-minute blockbuster about Manchester United’s relegation in the 1973-74 season. Ten minutes into the film the United winger Willie Morgan starts to talk about Wilf McGuinness, who enjoyed an uneasy succession to Matt Busby.

Manchester United are crumbling, so why the lack of fan fury? | Jonathan Wilson Read more

With United in the middle of a losing run McGuinness called Bobby Charlton out for a talk on the Old Trafford pitch after training. Charlton had already showered and changed into his suit and tie. It was a wet, freezing day and as he spoke he put his hands in his pockets briefly. At which point McGuinness pointed out that hands in pockets was a breach of club rules during what was still technically training.

Dutiful as ever, Charlton bent down in his pinstripes to do 10 penalty press-ups on his own in the rain in the Old Trafford centre circle so his manager would agree to talk to him again. “McGuinness was sacked a few days later,” Morgan added, not really needing to say much more.

Later in the film there are some great shots of a gorgeously ripe, slightly fried-looking George Best – beard sprouting, hair a little straggly, but still whippet thin and with that same playful sadness in his lovely blue eyes. Best is shown pouring champagne down a foaming tower of glasses, something people seemed to do at pretty much every social gathering in the 1970s but which has now sadly gone out of fashion, due to political correctness going mad or the popularity of the flute over the more decadent goblet, one or the other.

The Fiver: sign up and get our daily football email.

There was footage of a TV reporter door-stepping Miss Great Britain, literally in her Miss Great Britain robes, to ask if Best was feeling depressed. “You saw George last night didn’t you,” the reporter demands of Miss Great Britain, which is to be fair probably a fairly decent guess just on the basic percentages. Miss Great Britain rolls her eyes then smiles a private smile, remembering something. “Well … he looked OK to me.”

But it wasn’t George or Miss Great Britain who stood out as the most poignant on-screen presence. And it certainly wasn’t José Mourinho, who appeared earlier in the evening inside BT’s new “manager box”, a panel that pops up in the comer of the screen giving live and uninterrupted coverage of middle-aged men looking worried while football happens. At one point Mourinho just stood completely still in his little box for what felt like ages, face completely blank, hanging in the bottom of the TV screen like a particularly sour and sallow Halloween pumpkin.

Ederson leads the way as a ball-playing Premier League midfielder in gloves Read more

It was instead the basic premise of Too Good To Go Down that made it so apt. United being relegated has always been an interesting oddity. These days it seems medieval. The stratification of resources in club football has created an oligarchy of interests at the top. It is impossible this could ever happen again. Money will not allow it.

The downside of which is that – whisper it – we now have a high grade but deeply predictable league. This week the research group CIES Football Observatory published a paper called Competitive Balance: A Spatio-Temporal Comparison. Its conclusions reflect what we already know to be true, that the top clubs in every European league are pulling away.

The champions of the big five leagues raked in 83.3% of all possible points last season. More games are being won by a wider margin by a group of elite clubs, all of whom are now too big to fail. United can have a wretched season, can clank about the pitch like a group of sad, misfiring robots, and still the worst thing that might happen is they finish behind Everton.

The upside of this is the presence of some truly spectacular champion teams. Here is another stat from midweek: Manchester City have the best goal difference of any club at this stage since Sunderland in 1892-93. It might seem perverse to see this as a problem: City are a pure joy to watch, drilled and styled with such a luminous set of footballing rhythms, such a generous, captivating style of play.

But this comes with its own issues when you’re just too global-scale for 80% of your own league. BT also had City’s trip to Watford on Tuesday. The game was enlivened at the end by Watford pulling a goal back, something the entire post-match debrief was given over to marvelling at, as though nobody there could quite believe they’d been present at a moderately tight 2-1 away win.

Manchester United v Fulham: match preview Read more

How to address all this? How to fight the inbuilt competitive obsolescence of Big Sport? Regulation is a dirty word. The market will not stand for salary caps or rules on ownership, or even, it seems, for the existing financial strictures. This is unfair and regressive, the argument goes. Liverpool and United had more money than everyone else back in the 1970s and 1980s. But then, in the 1970s and 1980s the league was also won by seven teams in 11 years, back when having a little more did not mean being able to buy the world and all that is in it.

Plus, United could still go down back then. And guess what? It was good for them too. A team haunted by past glories were cleared out and energised, freed up to play thrillingly carefree attacking football. United came back with the shackles of the past thrown off, those red shirts treading lightly. Just imagine. Hmm. Relegation maybe. But let’s keep it credible.

• This article was amended on 8 December 2018 to reflect that Manchester United were relegated at the end of the 1973-74 season, not in 1973 as an earlier version said.