Many of our non-UK readers will be aware of English club’s recent success in the Champions league with four clubs making up the quarter final draw to take place this Friday in Switzerland. Cue unbearable amounts of smugness on the part of newspaper journalists on these shores regarding the Premiership’s status as ‘The Best League in the World’. Honestly, if they could have been any more pleased with themselves on Sky’s Sunday Supplement they would have spontaneously combusted.
If you measure quality of an entire league based on four team’s success in a European club competition, then in this instance you would be correct. The Premiership is the best league in the world. I, however, do not. I measure the quality of a league based on the quality of football played and the entertainment yielded as a result. In this respect, La Liga at worst holds its own against its English counterpart and at best by far outstrips it.
If you need any indication of the arrogance in which the British now hold their top league competition, I refer you to a comment made by Graeme Souness (failed manager turned pundit) before Chelsea’s game against Aston Villa last month. It was due to be Guus Hiddink’s first game in charge of Abramovich’s plaything, and he was emphasizing just how tough a job it would be. ‘He will not find this easy, obviously he is a coach with a great track-record but this is different from his previous postings. Teams don’t make it easy for Chelsea, Chelsea have no easy games. PSV, Real Madrid….they have easy games – Chelsea don’t’
I’ll let that unmitigated horseshit sink in first of all. Graeme Souness (in the employ of Sky, lest we forget) is suggesting that the Premierships is some kind of egalitarian football utopia where anyone can beat anyone. He is a moron. Chelsea have difficult games because they are a functional, uncreative team with no width who, John Terry apart, really are not very good at the back. The Premiership has rubbish teams coming out of its ears, and is no different from any other league, dominated by a coterie of three or four of the richest sides year after year, with the occasional exception. Souness’s comment, no doubt to murmured agreement on sofas across the UK, only adds fuel to the fire generated by English clubs success in the Champions League this year.
There is a reason why there are four English teams in the CL quarter finals – they have more money. They are able to pay inflated sums for players that other teams from other leagues do not match. £26m for Fernando Torres. £30m for Dimitar Berbatov. £20m for Robbie Keane. £28m for Wayne Rooney. Teams in France, Germany and Italy cannot match this spending, and only Real Madrid and Barcelona can match it elsewhere. Real Madrid are a basket case of a club not worthy of comparison, and Barcelona are probably the only realistic challengers to English hegemony in Europe. The TV money bumps English sides up, with Sky forking out ever-larger sums that dwarf those paid out to teams in Germany, Italy and Spain. How are they going to compete? Fans in Germany don’t really want the TV money to skyrocket if it turns their football into the sanitized, overpriced experience the Premiership has become. The Bundesliga title race is the closest it has been in years this season, while La Liga, for people who enjoy football played on the floor, continues to set the standard in entertainment. The day the Premiership is held up as the benchmark, where clubs are controlled by billionaires on highly debt-leveraged purchases, where fans are charged £60 a ticket and £32m is shelled out on fancy dans like Robinho, and where clubs in the lower divisions bankrupt themselves trying to make it there, is a sad day indeed.
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