I'm not an economist but the examples with tobacco and premier league wages struck me too as extremely bad. Supply/demand curves are an abstraction and for that abstraction to be remotely useful, you need to assume all else is being equal. You can't just take decades of data, with massive change in culture and health consciousness, and declare "Supply/demand curves are wrong because tobacco price fell, while consumption also fell! The economists lied to us when they told us price is the only thing that drives consumption!"

Well, bullshit, no economist ever claimed that.

And the rising salaries of the premier league plays are not a big mystery. If all clubs can fire the worst 50% of their players, their salary budget is increased. If that happens in a company like McDonalds, you can can just keep paying the rest the same or even less because everyone can flip burgers. Premier league clubs can't just pocket the "saved" money, they still need the absolute top players to win and if you don't pay your talent the most you can afford, some other club will. This has nothing to do with the failings of supply/demand curves. If anything it's a prime example of them working exactly as expected.