Is this really the beautiful game? Well yes, and no … but the panic is fun to watch | Barney Ronay

If every win is going to be painful from here, you may as well just take the painful wins – welcome to Arsenal’s late title stagger

On Thursday night at a swanky London hotel so luxuriously risk‑averse the toilets are equipped with wireless thermostats to control to within half a degree the heat of the seat, the Premier League chief executive, Richard Masters, spoke in detail for the first time about the prospect of “Premflix”, the direct‑to‑consumer model of the future, an app that will sluice this irresistible footballing opiate directly into the eyeballs of 8 billion rapt humans.

In doing so Masters was echoing the words of Todd Boehly on the same stage 12 months earlier, who had talked about the Premier League as a kind of fire stolen from the gods, source of the next great tech platform, an engine of empire, tool of world domination, of lassoing the moon out of the sky.