Bolstered by television riches the top flight’s middle-classes are on the rise, epitomised by Leicester City, and have closed the gap on clubs such as Manchester United and Chelsea, who scare no one any more

It may simply be that this season is a freak. Leicester have 47 points after 23 games; not since 2002-03 have the leaders had fewer than 50 points at this stage. If teams keep winning points at the same rate as they have up till now, they will end up with 78, the lowest tally to win the title since Manchester United did it with 75 in 1996-97 when they effectively had the league sown up by the beginning of May and drew three games on the run-in, still finishing seven clear of Newcastle United in second.

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Perhaps next season we’ll be back to the familiar pattern of the big four swatting all others aside. All of them have had their specific problems this season. But perhaps there is something else, something more general, going on.

Let’s start, though, with the flaws. This is not the strongest of big fours. Chelsea are suffering whatever ague it is that afflicts teams in their third season after appointing José Mourinho, and perhaps paying for some less than judicious transfer dealing amid a general retrenchment.

Manchester City are heavily reliant on Vincent Kompany and Sergio Agüero for leadership and penetration and both have had injury problems, a situation not helped by the sense that they’re essentially treading water until Pep Guardiola arrives (or doesn’t) next summer.

Manchester United find themselves trapped in the shadow of Alex Ferguson, struggling to work out how to win things without a volcanic Glaswegian chewing gum on the bench (perhaps they will eventually install a crude representation by the touchline and engage in ritual mastication and wrist-tapping to try to entice the cargo to return).

Arsenal are still Arsenal, Arsenalling along with their heroic wins and their foolish defeats, accumulating an entirely Arsenal-like number of points. Project their current points per game to the end of the season and they’d get 73 points; last season they got 75, the season before that 79, before that 73, 70, 68, 75, 72. It just looks slightly more impressive this season because they’ve got a reliable goalkeeper and because everybody else is struggling.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Crystal Palace’s signing of Yohan Cabaye from Paris St-Germain is a sign of changing times. Photograph: Adam Holt/Reuters

But there have been seasons before when giants have struggled and their flaws haven’t been exposed quite as readily as this. It may be that they’ve never been quite so flawed before, or not all so flawed at the same time. But the ability of the Premier League’s middle-classes to take advantage has also been enhanced.

In his 1996 book Full House, the US evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould examines the quirk that no batter had achieved a 0.400 average in baseball since Ted Williams in 1941. Many theories had been advanced as to why: was it that players were simply better then? Did increased cross-country travel grind batters down? Perhaps night games played under floodlights made it harder?

The answer, Gould reasoned, was not that batters had got worse. It was that everybody else had got better. Contemporary batters, he concluded, were probably better in absolute terms that the batters of the thirties. They were fitter, they had better equipment and travelling by plane was rather less gruelling than by train. But they were worse relative to the standard of everybody else. “Hit it where they ain’t,” Williams used to say; but that was easier in his day with slower, less agile fielders – to say nothing of improvements in pitching over time and data analysis of how batters bat that makes them easier to thwart.

This is part of Gould’s more general thesis about evolution. “The vaunted progress of life,” he wrote, “is really random motion away from simple beginnings, not directed impetus toward inherently advantageous complexity.” In baseball terms, there is a bell curve in variation from best to worst players; Gould’s argument is that the spread has diminished over time while the league average has remained essentially the same, flattening out statistical variations.

It may be that this is what we are seeing in the Premier League. The economic model was revolutionised by the arrival of Roman Abramovich in 2003. Vast sums were needed to compete at the highest level, whether from a benefactor or the commercial exploitation of a dominant market position.

But with the improved television deal, suddenly everybody has money. According to the latest Deloitte Report, 17 of the richest 30 clubs in the world are in the Premier League (and that’s before the new TV deal has actually begun). Dimitri Payet will go to West Ham. André Ayew will go to Swansea. Yohan Cabaye will go to Crystal Palace. There is less need for the non-giants to sell, less financial advantage for the best players at the non-giants to move. Given that even with a tendency to stockpile there is a limit to how many players a club can sign, it may be that there is a saturation point, that when everybody is enormously rich, having a little bit more simply doesn’t matter that much. The spread of the bell curve has narrowed.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The lack of game time Loïc Rémy, right, has had at Chelsea may persaude players it is better to be a regular at a smaller club than on the bench elsewhere. Photograph: Adam Davy/PA

There may also be something self-perpetuating about this. The big teams have lost their aura. Nobody is scared of anybody any more. Every team goes to every ground thinking they can get a result rather than looking merely to avoid humiliation. It may even be, although this perhaps is overly optimistic, that the achievement of Leicester will persuade players in future that it is better to be a Riyad Mahrez or a Jamie Vardy playing regularly and attracting attention at a non-giant than to be Fabian Delph or a Loïc Rémy living in obscurity on a giant’s bench.

There’s also the oddity that the two most exciting managers in the Premier League are at the fifth- and sixth-wealthiest clubs, enabling Liverpool and Tottenham to challenge the recent dominance of the big four.

At some point, the elite will sort themselves out. There may be some validity in the excuse that the Premier League’s relentlessness undermines results in the Champions League, but at the same time results in Europe suggest significant shortcomings among England’s best sides.

The likelihood is that in a few years this season will still look unusual. But there’s also reason to believe that it may not look freakish either, that enormous wealth all round means less statistical variation, means a more tightly bunched league table.