It's not his fault that he keeps winning though :-) Old master against young wolf representing new generation duel has its charm. It's symbolic. It adds to the spirit of the match. The author of the article whines that Anand is not the strongest player anymore. So what ? If you want the strongest player look at the rating list. He holds the title which because of its tradition and all the battles fought for it has big value for chess fans around the world.

Winning Wimbledon in tennis is prestigious because of all the players who won it before and because all the great matches played there. It's because of tradition and living memories. It's the same in chess. The author proposes just scratching it off. His idea is similar to getting rid of Wimbledon and creating some new tournament in Dubai instead.

The existing system significantly favors the incumbent, who only needs to win a single match to retain his title for another cycle. Most other sports do not hand the title holder a free pass to a 1:1 match. Anand could have shaken up the chess world, and won himself a great deal of respect, by offering to go through qualification himself, but he didn't.

He holds the title which because of its tradition and all the battles fought for it has big value for chess fans around the world.

You're begging the question here. The author is saying that the title should not have so much value.

What author wishes doesn't matter, you need decades of tradition, games and drama to have this kind of value. It already exists and we can just move it at will. One thing to do is to exploit it by organizing new matches with maybe some adjustments to qualification system (and maybe even getting rid of incumbent advantage). Other thing which author proposes is just scratching it all off and start a new thing - this new thing being yet another tournament (with it being long bringing disadvantages I wrote about in other post). Again, it's like scratching Wimbledon because it's on grass or World Cup because winning it is easier than placing say 4th in Primera Division. Still people care 10x more about "silly" Worlc Cup as they care way more about anachronic World Championship match.

New system might be fairer, better, w/e but just because it's new you just lost many fans, interest and sponsors.

Actually, Anand is in top 3 strongest players in the world. Aronian might be better than him but Anand is certainly better than Gelfand, Caruana, Grischuk, Nakamura, & Kramnik. All these players have higher ratings.

The author is too hung up on the rating being an absolute measure of ability, but Elo has its own set of problems (e.g. rating inflation). Anand has very little incentive to play open tournaments and compete for rating points when he can instead spend all his effort defending his title for a big payout.

That happens in all sports that have a world championship.

There is often a difference between World Champion and World Number One.