Maybe if they had marketed La Liga properly they wouldn't be relying on an ageing player to keep up it's profile.
maybe if their TV rights over the last 30 years has been shared more equally, they would have a more competitive league.
I've seen those arguments being throwed around a lot, more than in previous years, but both of those arguments lack context.
About the TV rights sharing, as it's been said a lot of times, the first ones that didn't want that were medium sized teams, when TV rights became huge in the 90's, Real Madrid and Barcelona were ok with all the teams sharing a collective agreement to negotiate, teams like Deportivo, Sevilla, Betis or Valencia said no
- First because in a war for the media rights, some channels used them to haggle the price with Madrid and Barcelona, they found that they could save money by investing part of what they could offer to Real and Barça to the rest of teams on the league, in the end if you have the rights of 18 teams, you're going to have a Real Madrid or Barcelona game per week secured. That money blinded the usual 90's Spanish president with a little more money on the short run and a lot less money on the long run.
- Second, the money those teams got for the medium and short term got to their heads, they invested all of it hoping to dethrone the big 2, thinking that there was a lot more on their way in next years, it wasn't that way.
- Third, they used their position of power to screw teams out of the equation, Extremadura, Oviedo, Racing de Santander, Salamanca, Mérida... all those teams that were basically fodder to fight on relegation those years got less money than they deserved because the midsize kingpings didn't want their position threatened by clubs from below.
They're asking now for what they rejected in the past, and even if they can have a point since some teams aren't owned by the same people, other teams are still ran by the legacy of their past owners, until those guys make way for new people, consensus will be hard to find.
And about how La Liga has failed to market themselves... they've done a decent job, but there's a big elephant in the romm, this league doesn't have the tools to fight on the same ground with the EPL, Bundesliga or even Serie A or Ligue 1 if things keep changing.
In the EPL scenario, for starters the EPL has a bigger reach just on language alone, with native language viewers all over the world and, most importantly, with the biggest media in the world and a lot of GDP countries on that list (US and Australia are good examples).
If you compare their national market, it's 47M in Spain, 67M in the UK, 67M in France, 60M in Italy and 83M in Germany, that alone speaks about how hard it should be for La Liga to aim for the 1st spot in the world when it coexists in the same continent with bigger, richer countries that also have Football as their 1st sport priority.
Regarding the game times there's also another factor, Spain is in a different latitude to most of those leagues, and it's in a wrong timezone, something that has shaped the culture and customs of the Spanish people in many things, from eating and sleeping habits, to leisure time and ultimately, football. Going to a game at 13:00 it's not the same same for a German or a English than for a Spaniard, in order to better export our product to better time gaps, we have to take away the game as it's known from its society, and then there's the latitude problem, playing it's not the same in Gelsenkirchen or Brighton from February onwards, than doing so to Sevilla, Valencia or Granada. You can't even compare Napoli to Sevilla since "at the same time" there's almost one and a houlf hour difference between cities, even if their clocks don't reflect it.
Spanish is also an international language, but the power of it's media doesn't rival the power of the internation UK/US channels, and even in countries that could've been a gold mine for La Liga (let's say Mexico or Argentina), the local leagues have more impact than La Liga, that's not the situation with EPL vs MLS or the A-League.
And lastly, the population density of each country has a drastic effect on the overall level of the leagues.
Part of why the EPL is the king right now is because you have better games on a daily basis, not just due to the general level of the teams (deciding if West Ham is a better team than Levante is for another topic), the country has more people, and that people spreads more around a bunch of teams and has better connections between games than someone from Vigo who wants to watch any away game in La Liga (closest travels, Madrid and Bilbao) and things get even worse when Mallorca, Las Palmas or Tenerife have a spot in 1st division. This has a huge impact in the perception of the overall level of the league, specially in social media era, because who cares if Granada, Levante or Real Sociedad are having a great season in La Liga, if virtually no one is talking about it on forums, reddit or youtube? Spain is, again, at a disadvantage here, since everything steers around Barcelona and Madrid with no sign of it changing.
Maybe the situation could change if a new team manages to find success in Barcelona and rival the local team (hard to do, if you account what FC Barcelona represents to that area), or if Valencia manage to free themselve from corrupt boards. Even Bilbao's signing politics, something to be proud of, ends up hampering the overall level of La Liga, since it's basically blocking the 3rd biggest region of the country from bringing a juggernaut club capable of rival Real Madrid and Barcelona (like they used to do in the pre-bosman era).
If we're being realistic, we have two options, we either have a fair competition within our national market at the cost of losing power on the European side, or we adapt to our situation and put all our efforts in powering the only teams that can go toe to toe with other European powerhouses. As nice as it would be, I can't see a future in which Barcelona and Real Madrid lose their advantages over Valencia, Sevilla, Betis or Real Sociedad and remain as competitive in the UCL as they've been for the past 30 years.