Of course the main story from this weekend's Premier League action was the trophy presentation for Leicester at the King Power. The overture, a 3-1 victory over Everton, was their victory lap, and the fans sang and celebrated the whole game. Yea, there was much rejoicing. Congrats to Leicester for their amazing accomplishment.

In the meantime, other teams still had stuff to play for. The most important matches featured the teams still battling for Champions League spots. In terms of both a club's finances and prestige, the difference between a 4th-place finish and the spot in the Champions League playoffs that go with it, and 5th place and having to settle for the Europa League, is huge. To a lesser extent, the difference between 3rd and 4th, and direct entry into the Champions League rather than needing to play a playoff, matters too. While I can't think of a season in which the British 4th-place team failed to qualify for the group stages--the 2nd place team from Armenia, or whatever, rarely poses too stern of a challenge--there's still the not-insignificant energy expended on the home-and-away tie.

Thus ManU's 0-1 win at Norwich, coupled with Man City's 2-2 draw at home to Arsenal, could add up to major repercussions for next season. Man City remain in 4th place, two points ahead of ManU, but because ManU have a game in hand, Man City have lost control of their own destiny. If ManU wins out against West Ham and Bournemouth, and Arsenal beat dreadful Aston Villa--a near surety--then Man City would find themselves in 5th place and playing in the Europa League next season. Not exactly where City were supposed to be in advance of Pep Guardiola's arrival. Oops.

My beloved Tottenham Hotspur went into the weekend with a vastly superior goal differential over both Arsenal and Man City, meaning that there was no realistic scenario in which Spurs could fail to finish at least third. From a certain perspective, the difference between second and third is negligible--2nd earns the team a bit more money, but both positions earn direct entry to the Champions League and the riches that go with it.

But I don't share that perspective. I'm a die-hard fan. To me, the most important thing, now that Champions League play is assured, is that Spurs finish ahead of Arsenal. We need to finish 2nd. We need to finish 2nd.

Unfortunately, for the third week running, Spurs dropped points from a winning position, this time holding a 1-0 lead at White Hart Lane over Southampton before giving up two goals to lose 1-2.

So it comes down to this: unless Arsenal beat Aston Villa by 14 goals, a Spurs draw against at Newcastle earns them second place. The mid-season Spurs side would be a shoo-in for at least a point against Newcastle, but the team we see now is a lot different.

Mauricio Pochettino continues to say that the problem is that Spurs are young, that they haven't fully developed the mental/emotional toughness that will give them the tenacity to close out matches. And while some results from earlier in the season support this hypothesis--their 2-2 draw against Stoke at White Hart Lane back in August, in which Spurs held a 2-0 lead, and their 1-1 draw against Leicester at the King Power a week later, in which Dele Alli's 81st minute goal was negated by a Leicester equalizer only a minute later, both come to mind--that's not what we're seeing now. In each of the last three matches, the same thing happened when Spurs took the lead: their intensity fell through the floor.

The main players for Spurs are clearly exhausted. They literally cannot maintain full competitive intensity for 90 minutes. To say that they're showing cracks under the strain downplays what's actually happening--consider that both Dele Alli and Mousa Dembélé have been suspended for the rest of the season because of violent conduct charges, in both cases the incident in question being far more petulant than actually dangerous, a loss of discipline and control.

I was hoping that I could get to the final weekend or two of the season with only a relaxed interest in the results--"Oh, look, ManU lost"--but it hasn't turned out that way. Now, I go into the final week worried that Spurs are going to fail to get that final point against Newcastle, and that Arsenal will finish ahead of them in the league for the 21st straight year.

Which fuck that. COME ON YOU SPURS.

Leicester City are champions of England. Tottenham Hotspur's ill-tempered 2-2 draw at Chelsea yesterday gave Leicester an insurmountable lead atop the Premier League table with two matches remaining. The 5000-to-1 Foxes have completed the greatest sports underdog story of all time. Congratulations to them.

It's an amazing story, and I don't want to diminish it, but as a fan of sports I can't help but feel a little disappointed. The end was something of an anti-climax. The better story would have happened had Spurs won at Stamford Bridge. Then Leicester City would have needed a draw or better at home to Everton on Saturday to clinch the title. Imagine 32,000 fans at the King Power Stadium absolutely losing their minds, witnessing something they never would have dared believe were it not actually happening. It would have been insane.

Instead, Spurs blew a 0-2 lead and the title fell into Leicester's lap.

I need to remember that Leicester controlled their own destiny this past Saturday. Had they beaten ManU at Old Trafford, the title would have been theirs. I shouldn't lay all or even most of the blame at Spurs' feet. But I'm struggling not to.

For Spurs, there was a lot more on the line than just the prospect of an emotionally thrilling Leicester City-Everton match on Saturday. With the draw, Spurs clinched no worse than fourth place in the league, guaranteeing themselves a spot in Champions League qualifying for next season, but no Spurs fan will be satisfied unless Spurs take second and finish ahead of their arch-rivals Arsenal for the first time in forever. Every year that I've been a Spurs fan, I've been forced to watch as Arsenal supporters celebrate St. Totteringham's Day, the day Arsenal's league finish ahead of Tottenham is assured. I don't know if there's a commensurate celebration for when the tables are turned, so I want to create one. We'll call it St. Arsenhole's Day, and I really want to celebrate it.

On paper, Spurs should be able to put this thing to bed. They have a three-point lead and a gigantic goal differential, with matches against mid-table Southampton (home) and fighting-against-relegation Newcastle (away) to finish the season. It seems reasonable to expect that Spurs could simply assert themselves as the superior side, beat Southampton on Sunday, and lock up second place.

But Spurs have had multiple opportunities to do so (or even grab first) this season already, and they've failed to take them. Back on March 5th, they were up 2-1 against 10-man Arsenal with 30 minutes remaining but only managed to hold on for the draw. (Had they won back then, they'd have 2nd place locked up now.) Last week, they were up 1-0 against a pretty sorry West Bromwich Albion side, but again let down and settled for a draw. Their collapse against Chelsea yesterday was particularly ugly. Not only could they not close out the match with a 0-2 lead, they couldn't hold their discipline at all. Their players received nine yellow cards, the most ever in a Premier League match. They might still lose Mousa Dembele and Eric Dier to retrospective action. Last week Dele Alli lost his shit and got himself suspended for the rest of the season for a petulant punch to a West Brom player's midsection. This week, it was like, instead of learning from his mistake, the team decided to follow his lead.

It's clear that the energetic cost of the season--38 matches in the league, two domestic cup competitions, plus all the matches (and the travel) in Europe--has ultimately become too much to bear. The letdowns against West Brom and Chelsea show that Spurs couldn't maintain competitive intensity. Their season isn't over yet. I think of a 2016 St. Totteringham's Day and I shudder. I won't be comfortable until second place is officially in the bag.

If you are a fan of sports at all and you aren't putting some energy into paying attention to the English Premier League this year (for the uninitiated, I'm talking about the sport we call soccer), you are missing one of the great sports stories of all time in Leicester City and their run at the Premier League title.

At the beginning of April last year, Leicester sat last in the Premier League on 19 points with nine games to play. The bottom three teams get relegated; Leicester were seven points behind the 17th-place team. Over those last nine matches, Leicester won seven and drew one, a remarkable run, and finished the season in 14th place.

A little more than a year later, they sit atop the Premier League table. They have a seven-point lead over my beloved Tottenham Hotspur. Assuming Tottenham are perfect the rest of the way, Leicester need to take nine points from their remaining five games to win the league.

Is it possible for a team, rather than the players on it, to take performance enhancing drugs?

This is a Cinderella story like nothing anyone has ever seen. No analogy I've been able to come up with does it justice. Some cupcake 16-seed winning the NCAA tournament? That's not even close to an adequate comparison. Even the best teams in the NCAA, teams comprised entirely of future pros, are still teams of amateurs in their teens and early 20s. No matter how good a top team is, it's still incredibly green and unformed. The top teams in the Premier League are comprised of seasoned professionals, some of the best players in the world.

Furthermore, to win the NCAA, that storied cupcake 16-seed Cinderella only needs six wins in a row. Whereas I would argue that league soccer is the best, fairest competition in sports. Every team in the league plays every other team home and away, and the winner is the team with the best overall record over the course of the entire season. No one gets an easy path against weaker teams. There's no series of playoffs. There's no way a lucky streak can bring, for example, a sub .500 team into March Madness, as can happen in NCAA basketball. There's no way a terrible division can allow an 8-8 team into the playoffs, as can happen in the NFL. In league soccer, a six- or eight-game hot streak is lovely, but it won't make up for poor play for the rest of the season. The league rewards consistent form from the start of the season until the end--a season that lasts from mid-August until mid-May, by the way. Over a 38-match, nine-month season, there's no choice but to navigate inevitabilties like accumulated fatigue and injuries.

Leicester City were given odds of 5000-to-1 to win the Premier League. By contrast, the Philadelphia 76ers were 250-to-1 against winning the NBA Championship in 2015-16. Read that again. The Philadelphia 76ers, a team that literally sometimes plays a cardboard cutout of ex-US Men's National Team member Mike Burns¹ as its fifth player^{[citation needed]} and has gone 25-631 over the past eight seasons,^{[citation needed]} were considered twenty times more likely to win their championship than Leicester City was.

The closest analogy I can come up with to what Leicester are on the brink of accomplishing is this: Imagine an NBA where, instead of us having to put up with shitty teams in the NBA East like the Knicks and the 76ers embarrassing themselves and professional sports and all of America every year, each year the worst three teams get sent down to play in the D-League, and the top three teams from the D-League get to take a shot at the NBA. I have no idea what cities are in the D-League and neither does anyone else, so let's pretend that at the end of the 2013-2014 season, the Knicks, the Nets and the 76ers all got sent down to the D-League (as they should have been) and the, let's say, Des Moines Flamethrowers, the Huntsville (Alabama) Stilettos and the Boise Waterboarders all got to come play against Golden State and San Antonio and the rest. Let us further posit that the NBA had done away with the salary cap and just let the market dictate who played where, which would mean that top teams would regularly raid lesser teams for quality personnel, creating a self-perpetuating system in which the top teams make the most money so they have the most money to spend on the top players who then go play for the top teams.

(Quick aside: Have you ever found it interesting that in America, where, notwithstanding Bernie Sanders' presidential run, the word socialist is pretty much a slur, we choose to enforce salary caps in most of our professional sports in order to maintain "a level playing field?")

Now imagine that Boise, featuring players no one else even dreamed of wanting, had a 3-0 series lead and a 15-point lead at halftime in game four of the NBA finals. Imagine the bricks you would be shitting.

To call this story "unlikely" doesn't do it justice. If it weren't actually happening, it would sound like a story that had been rejected by Hollywood as too maudlin.

That's what Leicester are on the brink of accomplishing.

Speaking of Hollywood: Leicester City's biggest star is their forward, Jamie Vardy. Just four years ago, he was plying his trade for non-League Fleetwood Town. Now, he is the second-top scorer in the Prem, currently just one goal behind Harry Kane. The conversation piece of, "If they made a movie about your life, who would play you?" is in his case not academic: right now the rumored names include Ryan Gosling, Matt Damon, and Leonardo DiCaprio. (All of whom, you'll note, are North American. But maybe that isn't as outrageous as it sounds. Currently topping the list to play me in the movie version of my life are two Brits, Sir Ben Kingsley and Idris Elba.)

And if I were Hollywood, why stop there? A rags-to-riches biopic about handsome, hardworking Jamie Vardy is pretty obvious. Why not a movie about the unlikely triumph of the team as a whole? We'll frame it within a rom-com and give it a name that's a trying-to-be-clever pun on some football term. Off the Bar or something like that. I'd cast Rosario Dawson as a plucky, slightly scattered and strangely nationalistic American graduate student who initially abhors what she derisively calls "soccer," declaring early in the movie that "properly speaking, football is a game played by armored gladiators carrying the ball with their hands." But she discovers an unlikely love for the game via her equally unlikely relationship with a diehard Leicester City fan, a charming, hangdog pub owner played by Colin Firth. I see dollar signs, Hollywood, and I know you do too. Call me.

But I digress.

As of last weekend, Leicester officially qualified for next year's Champions League, which means that next fall, several teams from the most rarefied stratum of world football--teams like Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern Munich, and AC Milan--will come to tiny Leicester to do battle in the King Power Stadium.

At this point, only a collapse more complete than Jordan Spieth's will keep them from winning the title. As I said above, assuming Tottenham are perfect from here, which includes a game at Stamford Bridge against Chelsea, Leicester need to take nine points from their remaining five games. That's three wins or two wins and three draws. Admittedly, they have a tricky schedule the rest of the way. They play against West Ham this weekend, then have a relatively easy game against Swansea at home, a somewhat trickier match against Everton, before finally finishing the season with tough matches away at ManU and Chelsea. But the assumption of perfection from Spurs is, shall we say, a difficult one. And Leicester's path got a little easier when West Ham, holding an outside chance at qualifying for the Champion's League, had a bad call in their game against Crystal Palace two weekends ago lead to a player being sent off, after which Palace equalized, and then last weekend against Arsenal saw blown offside calls incorrectly negate a goal for them and allow one for Arsenal. Both matches ended in draws. Then West Ham lost at home to a mediocre Manchester United side in a quarterfinal F.A. Cup replay yesterday. They're looking a bit demoralized.

I am a die-hard Tottenham fan. This is Spurs' best chance of winning the league since 1961, and I'm nevertheless excited at the prospect of Leicester winning the league. You should be too. You should watch. It's gonna be great.

¹ Mike Burns played defense for the USMNT during the 1998 World Cup. The USMNT played Iran in the first game of the U.S.'s ignominious 32nd-out-of-32-teams performance. On one Iranian corner, Burns had the defensive role of covering one of the posts. Iran scored between him and the post, leading some clever commentators to point out that on that play, actual flesh-and-blood Mike Burns would have been outperformed by a cardboard cutout of Mike Burns.

1. Three teams went down. But hey, three new teams are coming up, so don't worry about it. It's an endless cycle, like the seasons.

2. Amusingly, one of those teams, Wigan, also won the FA Cup, and so will get to play next year in both England's second division and in the Europa League.

3. ManU won the title for the 600th time. Ran away with it, in fact, which must have a group of oil sheikhs from the Middle East rather pissed off.

4. Related: One gazillion dollars spent on a team that failed to qualify for the Champions League knockout rounds, lost to lowly Wigan in the FA Cup final, and finished second in the league, well behind ManU? Bye-bye Roberto Mancini. (Would he have kept his job had they won the FA Cup?)

5. Goddamn Chelsea. 3rd place is pretty good for a team that yet again fired a coach mid-season and is in the middle of a major transition personnel-wise.

6. Arsenal in the Champion's League, Spurs out, again. Like I said Monday: Goddammit. I'll have more to say about this in another post.

7. Everton finished one spot ahead of Liverpool, which I mention mostly because I'm sure it made my friend Ruari happy.

8. Alex Ferguson retired, to be replaced by David Moyes. I'll have more to say about this, as well.

Goddammit.

If Arsenal fail to make the Champions League, after a 15-year run, maybe that will be the last straw, and they'll finally let Arsene Wenger go. Fans have been calling for his head for years: "We haven't won a trophy in eight years!" they say. And they add: "He sells off our best players!"

Well, that's sort of true. Arsene Wenger is obviously a very smart man. He's watched what Chelsea under Abramovich, ManU under the Glazers, and Man City under Abu Dhabi United have done. He can't have any illusions. Money buys the best soccer teams--to suggest otherwise is crazy. The idea that Wenger chose Arsenal's transfer policy--buy low, sell high--is silly. Clearly he has been instructed to run the club the way he has, and so he's had to watch as his best players have consistently left for more money and therefore better opportunities elsewhere.

(Don't believe it? It should be noted that Stan Kroenke, Arsenal's majority shareholder, also owns the Colorado Rapids of the MLS, the only team, last time I checked, that doesn't take advantage of MLS's Designated Player rule. In other words, from a fan's perspective, he's kind of a cheap bastard.)

So all the cries for Wenger's head tell me that Arsenal fans have no idea how good they have it. Wenger's ability to get top-four results out of a team of youngsters, second-rate players, and cast-offs past their prime has been profoundly amazing. That Arsenal fans are unable to see this surprises me. I guess they actually believe that Theo Walcott and Jack Wilshere and the others are world-class talents.

I lived in Madrid for a semester in college, and ever since I have always to some degree rooted for Real Madrid. I have watched the parade of managers in and out, and wondered what would happen if they hired someone who actually fit the team's personality. For years I've been thinking that Arsene Wenger is exactly that person.

So it is my devout hope that Arsenal will part ways with Arsene Wenger after the season, and that Real Madrid will snap him up after Mourinho leaves. What Wenger--who seems as devoted to making the beautiful game actually beautiful as anyone in soccer--would do with that squad, and with Real Madrid's credit card, intrigues me to my core as a soccer fan. It could be simply amazing. Of course, Real Madrid have a way of destroying even the best situations, so you can't be sure it would be a success, but I'd love to see it.

And when as Arsenal hire whoever's available and finish in 8th or 9th for the next five years, as the quality of their squad dictates they should, then maybe all those won't-shut-up Arsenal fans will be forced to reflect that they chased away exactly who it was that brought them the success they enjoyed.

I'm hardly the first person to note that there's something kind of nutty about rooting for a team (as opposed to rooting for a person). Today this guy is your star player and you love him, you cheer every time he touches the ball, you buy a shirt with his name on it. Next month he plays for another team and you hate him, you boo every time he touches the ball, he's a goddamn traitor. So in a sense you are rooting for clothing. That's crazy.

And that whole notion that the guy who leaves your team to go get more money or playing time or better coaching somewhere else is doing something wrong: in no other sphere of life would we look askance at someone who took a better job when one was offered. Would you hate a banker who left Citigroup for a bigger paycheck at Goldman Sachs? The correct answer is yes. But that's because bankers are awful people; the job change is immaterial. Sports stars don't bring down entire economies and throw millions of people out of work when they fuck up, but from the way we act when they put on a different team's shirt, you'd think it was the other way around.

Now, of course I recognize that rooting for your team is more complicated than what I just said. The shirts are symbols, obviously, and the whole "us vs. them" thing is essentially tribal and (ask me on a day when I'm feeling optimistic about humankind) maybe even atavistic. But when you are truly a fan, who you root for speaks to issues of identity and self-narrative. Do you root for a team because they play where you live? Because the team stands for a certain philosophy of play (e.g. in American football, how the Pittsburgh Steelers and Baltimore Ravens are known for their defenses)? Maybe your fandom started because you just like their uniforms. Whatever it is: all these things do say something about you.

Now, the place where the crazy really starts to shine is when you start to use tribal memory to filter events in the real world. But I also propose that this behavior is at the heart of true fandom. If your team is seen as constantly embattled (e.g. the Chicago Cubs), you will see events through that filter. "Of course Steve Bartman interfered with the ball and ruined everything. Of course he did."

So it is with me and Tottenham Hotspur. It started my first year rooting for the club, 2005-06. Going into the final game of the season, sitting in fourth place, one point above archrival Arsenal, ten Spurs players came down with what was believed to be food poisoning. They lost to not-very-good West Ham and ended up fifth and outside the Champions League.

(Indeed, I'd initially suspected that the food poisoning was intentional, a clever-yet-hideous ploy by some die-hard Arsenal fan. I never heard anything confirming my suspicions. I figured that sort of thing would be talked about a great deal if, you know, it had actually happened, so I decided the incident was just freak bad luck--but why did so many players have to eat the same food? But to give you an idea how deep the cultural narrative can run, it wasn't until just now when I did a little research on the incident that I learned that it wasn't food poisoning at all but a norovirus. That part of the story doesn't fit the narrative, so it isn't mentioned.)

With all that in mind, here's how I felt about this weekend's salient matches:
1) After getting a gift goal off a horrible mistake by the defense and goalkeeper, of course Spurs immediately gave the goal back.

2) Of course they found themselves down 2-1.

3) Of course the guy who scored Wigan's second goal, Callum McManaman, scored his first ever Premier League goal, after having failed to score in 22 prior appearances. Of course his first goal came against Spurs.

4) Of course Spurs can only get the equalizer off what had to be the scrappiest own-goal of all time.

5) Of course Arsenal take the lead off a Theo Walcott goal in which he was clearly offside.
(I'd like to thank Robin van Persie for taking advantage of a Bacary Sagna mistake and forcing the penalty kick. I'd like to thank ManU for at least getting a draw. But of course I'm mostly ignoring this aspect of the match. It doesn't fit the narrative.)

6) Of course Chelsea comfortably handle their business with a 2-0 win over Swansea.

7) Of course Spurs collapse again at the end of the season and look like they're gonna fail to make the Champions League. Of course this is what's happening.

All of this is crazy. But of course I think this way. I'm a fan.

Let me first of all be very clear about something: when it comes to Tottenham Hotspur, I am the furthest thing from objective. I discovered, sometime in the latter part of the '05-'06 season, that I had fallen in love with the club; I have enjoyed and suffered, in relatively equal portions, ever since.

So you'll please forgive that I can only talk about the Prem from the perspective of a totally besotted fan. I can speak objectively about the other leagues, but my main perspective on the Prem is, "How are Tottenham doing?"

So when I look ahead to this weekend's fixtures, I see only three matches that matter: Spurs @ Wigan, ManU @ Arsenal, and Swansea @ Chelsea. Yes, I understand that I'm supposed to care about Aston Villa vs. Sunderland, as a win for Villa would really help move them away from the drop zone, but really, for me, it's all about the battle for third and fourth place and those coveted Champions League spots.

Arsenal-ManU on Sunday would normally be the weekend's glamour fixture, but after ManU's demolishing of Villa on Monday to claim the Prem title with four games to spare, I have to assume that ManU will field a side composed of 16-year-olds from the reserve squad and players still hungover from Monday's celebrations. Assuming Spurs manage to win at 18th-place Wigan, which they must, the edge has to go to a desperately-needing-the-win Arsenal over a ManU with literally nothing to play for. It's likely to be worth watching for entertainment purposes, as a ManU with nothing to either win or lose will (I hope) go out and play their best attacking football, at least within the limitations I mentioned above.

Wigan-Spurs will be interesting, if only because there's so much at stake. Of the three teams in the bottom three (Wigan, QPR and Reading), only Wigan realistically have a chance of escaping, and so for them a home win is crucial. Spurs currently sit 5th in the table, and if they fail to get to a Champions League spot this season, we'll almost certainly see Gareth Bale follow in Luka Modric's footsteps and head out the door.

Of course the question regarding Spurs is: Which team will show up, the one we've mostly seen since they threw away a lead at Liverpool on March 10th, or the team that played the last half-hour against Manchester City last weekend? As a Spurs fan who's been burned many times before, I'm reluctant to take too much away from last weekend's final half-hour. Spurs looked dreadful for the first hour, and while it's true that they certainly shifted up a couple of gears, they did so against a team with little left to play for in the Prem: City sit five points clear of Arsenal (with a game in hand), six ahead of Chelsea and seven ahead of Spurs. Barring a complete collapse--and they have too much talent on hand for that to happen, don't they?--they'll be in the Champions League again next year.

I'm certainly not gonna watch Chelsea-Swansea--two matches per weekend is usually my limit--but I'll sure be rooting hard for 9th-place Swansea to steal at least a point from the match. Chelsea currently sit one point ahead of Spurs in the table, and every slip-up they make brings me joy.