A PERSONAL note. My brother's partner is Spanish. Her local club, Murcia, do not achieve much, or often. Their sole distinction is to be stuffed, most weeks, in some of the best club football available on the planet.

This is not said for argument's sake, or not entirely. If you had to watch your favourite provincial team lose with depressing regularity, what would be your default position? A day out with Manchester United? Chelsea? The Old Firm? Or Barca and Real?

For more years than I can be bothered to count, English colleagues have been giving me unsolicited lectures on the tedium of Scottish football. They have asked how we can stand it. Celtic, Rangers; Rangers, Celtic: so predictable. As one Londoner once put it, even the effin' Old Firm have to get bored eventually. True enough.

But some of those same southern colleagues have gone a bit quiet these past couple of years. They are not, so to speak, singing any more, not about "the best league in the world". They scribble instead over managers culled, a Ferguson gesticulation or three, and money. Always money.

That is, of course, lovely stuff. It makes the world go around. But it does not play football. And it does not create the best league in the world.

The rules of engagement in the English Premier division are now simple. If you are rich, get yourself into the Champions League and grow richer. If you are less well-endowed, don't get relegated, and don't sprinkle £50 million over the tiles. Anyone surviving between those two dull extremes must merely stumble onwards, cashing the Sky cheque.

If you are not "in the big four" you are making up the numbers, or avoiding relegation. If you are even the lesser half of the ordained quartet, with no actual hope of the title, you are being employed simply to secure a European bonus. So remind me: at what point does any of this cease to be as boring as that little Scottish league you enjoy mocking?

Then there is, as a starter for ten, the football. Any good? That small detail should be relevant, you might think, in "the greatest league in the world". As it happens, I have watched a lot of Arsenal this season, and have read more than is probably necessary about the great things Arsene Wenger has been doing with talented youngsters. Then I saw what Spurs did to M. Wenger, and to his rhetoric, in the Carling Cup.

We would have called it a hiding, once upon a time. "Beautiful football" became an afterthought in the rout. "Philosophy" and "Gallic flair" became mere pretensions. But, like a Tottenham fan, I had not then been reminded of life's realities. A beer-advert trophy does not "matter" at the Emirates, apparently. So what does?

I pay - not the paper, before you begin - for my Sky and for my Setanta. I have a rough understanding of the economic objectives of those broadcasters, of why they invest so heavily, and of why they need us to believe we are watching entertainment of unparalleled intensity and quality. But here's the problem: it isn't true. Notice how all the English football drama, this term, has involved coaches and owners rather than actual games. Ownership and management are important, no doubt, and riveting to the anoraks among us. These are not, however, the point.

Gillett, Hicks, Abramovich, the Glazers: no-one pays to watch them implement intricate financial agreements. The source of all that presumed wealth is a series of sporting events promising drama, romance and passion. Are you, as it were, getting any?

These days I can get to Newcastle almost as quickly as I can get to Edinburgh. Near the Tyne sits my favourite football ground, bar one. I have spent many happy if weird hours in the Bigg Market, and better times at the ground. I have a sentimental fondness for West Ham - a long story - but I have never met a Geordie I didn't like. (And then avoid). Yet seriously, with the best will in the world, Kevin Keegan? Again?

The point of these questions is that I am desperate to have my cynicism thrown back in my face. "The best league in the world" has become a near-farce dependent on corporate calculation and results ground out according to the balance sheet. I doubt that Keegan possesses the appetite or application to satisfy Newcastle's fans, or to shift the Premiership paradigm, but I want to see someone make the attempt. Not much to ask, surely?

It will all end in tears, of course. In sharp contrast, David Moyes and Martin O'Neill (neither English) are the best coaches operating in England, for two reasons: they are intelligent and sane. Both will proceed, in due course, either to take charge within that big four, or to raise their existing clubs to the level of contenders. For now, just to disrupt the tedium, we may have to rely on Keegan and whether he does, or does not, still "love it".

The English Premier League is big, but it is not beautiful. It relies on the fantasy that equates money with inevitable sporting achievement. Disparate Americans and odd Russians and various "sovereign funds" appear to have forgotten the cliché about investments going down in value as well as up. The English game seems stifled, dull, and no less predictable than the SPL. I'd call that a crisis.

Sir Alex of Ferguson should bear it in mind when next he complains about the absence of atmosphere at Old Trafford. The prawn-munching holders of those fantastically-expensive season tickets are simply bored. The product isn't worth the price. In TV, the movies, or pop music remedies would be sought. But not in this game.

In Murcia, much as in most of Scotland, they turn out to support the team, not the brand, not the franchise. They get to watch honest football, so I'm told, not a corporate venture. And life is never, unlike existence in the planet's greatest league, dull.