The quality of the premiership is shocking

I think what people are not realizing here is that the financial strength of the past three years is nothing compared to what it will be in the next three.

In the next 2-3 years, with the new TV deal kicking in next season, you will really see the PL pull away, in terms of recruiting talent - from top to bottom.

@Balu

The idea that England doesn't have a youth development foundation in place as good as anywhere is very inaccurate. Since Germany beat England in 2010 there has been a massive overhaul of youth coaching and development. The FA spent an absolute fortune to re-do things.

As your very own Karl Rummennige said:

“I’ve taken a look at Manchester City’s youth academy and all I can say is it doesn’t get any better than that,” he said. “I have also visited Tottenham’s, Arsenal’s and Chelsea’s and it’s the same wherever you go.

“I can tell you that the English are going all out, also in terms of youth development.”
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We have had a dry spell in terms of English talent coming through the passed 10 years, not too dissimilar to the one experienced by Germany before the 2010 golden generation came through. Brazil, Italy and Holland are also in a dry patch. These things go in cycles.
 
The head's of both La Liga and Bundesliga have both expressed a lot of concern about the way the PL is pulling ahead financially. They have said how they fear that midtable teams will be able to poach top players that don't player for the big 2/1 with big wages. This will happen. But it's not going to be over night.

The trajectory for the PL pulling away financially has been set for a while now and it will be in full swing next summer transfer window.
 
It's kinda funny how after a few games in the CL some people on here were talking about us having to save the honor of the English teams again and now we are the only English team not making it to the knock out rounds.
 
In an interview with kicker, Rummenigge said: "I recently talked to Florentino Perez, the Real [Madrid] president, and to [AC] Milan CEO Adriano Galliani. We agreed that England poses a great threat to all other European Leagues."

He warned that players were demanding more and more money and there would come a time "when it will get difficult for Bayern to withstand the money pressure from England."

Rummenigge warned that international competitiveness would be jepoardised "when we have to admit during contract talks" that offers from English clubs could not be matched."

"Then we'll lose sporting quality, and some in Bundesliga might actually like it," he added.

"Some of my colleagues have suggested that you can sell players for a high price and buy cheap. But that's a naive fallacy, and it won't work out."
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Paul the Wolf said:
Problem is that because no team in the PL is dominating or being consistently on top form then that is supposed to equate to the PL being poor. Which other league would have the 15th placed team being top of a CL group.
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Schalke and Dortmund had decent CL runs in seasons they struggled in the Bundesliga.
 
I don't feel the Bundesliga overall is better than the PL. For me the PL is still #2. Sure, Bayern would beat every PL team and probably Dortmund in this form too but overall the PL is better I'd say. Wolfsburg going through instead of Man Utd won't change my opinion. La Liga is still the best.
 
Paul the Wolf said:
The EPL is so shocking that they have 3 teams qualified for the KO stages of the CL, more than any other country other than Spain - Germany only have 2

Come on let's hear it
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You were just rubbing your hands waiting to bump this thread weren't you.:)

My original point was how the league is looking poor given how the 'top teams' are looking very average within it, maybe I was wrong in that the prem has just got a higher standard amongst the lesser teams nowadays making our top clubs look average, but tbf United have been woeful in Europe, City have struggled against the best team in their group, and Arsenal and chelsea have been far from convincing, if any of them come up against decent opposition they'll be beaten over 2 legs imo.

Maybe my original point should have been the premiership is maybe a high standard overall, but of a lower standard amongst the bigger teams than it should be, maybe that would have been fairer.
 
City have the quality, in terms of players to mount a credible challenge to anyone. But so far they have been underperformers in the CL. I think it may change this season.

United, Arse and Chelski are miles off. fecking miles.
 
Paul the Wolf said:
Problem is that because no team in the PL is dominating or being consistently on top form then that is supposed to equate to the PL being poor. Which other league would have the 15th placed team being top of a CL group.
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You must be joking? Just last season Dortmund topped their group (including Arsenal) in the CL while being tied for last place in the league during the winter break. A couple of years ago Schalke made the semis while finishing 14th (or smth like that).
 
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I don't get the league comparisons. One reason the EPL is so successful in generating interest is surely the simple fact that it's English, the world's de facto lingua franca. The scottish league is a bit obscure and useless and I don't even know if the other countries have leagues worth noting. Is it more competitive than the spanish league or the german league? I've said this before, I think league play is too different to compare them. German clubs are trying hard to perfect the technical game, Barca just bullies everyone in Spain into submission with sheer class and the English for some reason pride themselves in the physicality of the game, as inefficient as that is. Germany has run its head into technically gifted teams on club and national level for 20 years to learn this lesson... you'd think '66 till now was enough time for England to see the trend. No offense, this is something that was discussed before and I'm not actually saying something new.

What's new, though, is the TV deal. Despite what some here said about the EPL pulling away, I'm not so sure that's all there is to it. Sure, some teams will profit from this. But I'd wager that a lot of continental clubs are just going to add an "English bonus" to their bargaining whenever they have an EPL club at the table. Kinda like "Oh, you're Chelsea? No problem, we'll just ask for 20 million more, since... you know, you have it."

You'll surely get a lot of fine additions to the EPL, but it's going to cost you. The extra money from the EPL TV deal is going to land in continental Europe eventually. Small clubs get big money, where are they going to spend it? None of the other EPL clubs will be impressed with big bids half as much as most continental clubs. So you're again doing that one mistake that's been talked about so often, buying expensive in foreign lands and ignoring cheap talents from your own youth system. Don't count on winning national competitions like that anytime soon. As much as Rumenigge may have praised your youth system (ie, the facilities and staff), if you don't actually have something to show for it at the end, that is actual players on the field, it's just a waste of infrastructure.
 
It will all come in time.

Money rules all in the medium to long term in professional sports.
 
KingMinger22 said:
City have the quality, in terms of players to mount a credible challenge to anyone. But so far they have been underperformers in the CL. I think it may change this season.

United, Arse and Chelski are miles off. fecking miles.
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Indeed, at some point they will get close to winning it.
 
KingMinger22 said:
City have the quality, in terms of players to mount a credible challenge to anyone. But so far they have been underperformers in the CL. I think it may change this season.

United, Arse and Chelski are miles off. fecking miles.
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They don't have anywhere near the midfield required to beat 2 or 3 top teams over 2 legs then win a final and Pellegrini isn't exactly known for his defensive nous and big game bunkering ability. I don't see it, at all. Arsenal are similarly weak.

Of the Prem teams, I think Chelsea are still the likeliest CL winners. 0-0s and shootouts and Mourinho and Courtois. And before them I'd have the 3 best Spanish sides, Bayern, Juve and PSG. Wolfsburg and Roma are solid counter-attacking outfits without the upside of Chelsea in attack (Hazard, Costa) or Mourinho, but they could theoretically get quite far with the right draws and some luck, like Monaco damn near did last year.
 
2016
1 Spain | 94.999
2 Germany | 74.749
3 England | 72.284
4 Italy | 68.439

Saw these coefficients in another thread and think it's about right, Spain miles ahead of the rest. There are always anomalies of course, such as 3 English teams going through in the CL vs Germany's 2 but overall it makes sense.
 
I was talking to a friend who is a l'pool fan and he said, SAF held the standards high for the PL and all the other teams pushed him, so automatically the quality at the top of the league was WC. You can kind of see that now that he is retired, the top teams had a knock on effect and look week.
 
golden_blunder said:
I've always found that the passion & urgency of (most) games in the English leagues make them the most entertaining to watch. The leagues are the most likely to throw up a shock result as opposed to the German, Italian or Spanish leagues for example.
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Do you think this was always the case? I'm really interested in that, because what you say about 'shock results' wasn't true for the PL at all throughout the last decade. In fact, the PL was the least competitive and most predictable league during the last decade (2000-2009) if we look at how many points the league winners collected, how many different teams won the league or qualified for the CL. So you most have felt that the other top leagues were way more interesting back then?

I wanted to look into this for quite a while, so the following isn't directed at your post anymore, it's more a general point. The narrative about what makes a league great has totally changed since I started reading on the Caf in 2009. So here you go:

The 2000-2009 decade:

Number of different league winners:
Premier League: 3 (United, Arsenal, Chelsea)
La Liga: 4 (La Coruna, Real, Valencia, Barca)
Serie A : 5 ( Lazio, Roma, Juve, Milan, Inter)
Bundesliga: 5 (Bayern, Dortmund, Bremen, Stuttgart, Wolfsburg)

Points the league winners accumulated and points/game average:
Premier League:
91, 80, 87, 83, 90, 95, 91, 89, 87, 90 = 883 => 883/380 = 2.32points/game

La Liga:
69, 80, 75, 78, 77, 84, 82, 76, 85, 87 = 793 => 793/380 = 2.09 points/game

Serie A (*Juve's league title win that was taking away from them):
72, 75, 71, 72, 82, 86, 76 (91*), 97, 85, 84 = 800 (815*) => 2.11 (2.14*) points/game

Bundesliga (34 game league, so the points/game number at the end is the best way to compare):
73, 63, 70, 75, 74, 77, 75, 70, 76, 69 = 722 => 722/340 = 2.12 points/game

Number of different teams finishing in the CL spots:
I mention the number of CL spots to give some perspective, obviously it's more likely to have more diversity in the CL spots with 4 than with just 3 (thinking about it, I should have just compared top 4, but it would just add more teams to the German list and not a new one to the English one)

Premier League: 7 teams (8 seasons with 4 CL spots, 2 seasons with 3, 1 season with 5)
United, Arsenal, Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle, Chelsea, Everton

La Liga: 13 teams (4 spots in all 10 seasons)
La Coruna, Barca, Valencia, Real, Saragossa, Mallorca, Sociedad, Celta Vigo, Villareal, Betis, Osasuna, Sevilla, Atletico

Serie A: 9 teams (4 spots in all 10 seasons)
Lazio, Juve, Milan, Inter, Roma, Parma, Udinese, Verona, Fiorentina

Bundesliga: 9 teams (8 seasons with 3 spots, 2 seasons with 4)
Bayern, Leverkusen, Hamburg, 1860, Schalke, Dortmund, Stuttgart, Bremen, Wolfsburg

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So what's the conclusion? The PL was throughout the decade the most predictable and least competitive league out of the top 4, yet I'm sure we all would agree that it was the greatest league in the world for most of those 10 years.

I don't mind that people love and prefer the league, their club plays in. That's perfectly normal and again, I don't think the quality of the Premier League is shocking right now. That's a crazy suggestion, it's clearly an exciting league that just lacks quality at the top end for various reasons. But what I find so annoying is how massively the narrative about what makes a league exciting has changed and how many football fans on the Caf have moved the goalposts from one end of the pitch to the opposite end, just so that they can call other leagues shit or boring. It's great if someone finds the Premier League right now exciting for different reasons than before. There's an appeal to a league when it's crazy competitive or when you have record breaking sides that play amazing football every week. But the switch between these two happens in other leagues as well, just at different times.
 
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I just post this to show why it is not the same when e.g. the four EPL clubs get out of group stage compared to four clubs out of Spain or Germany. The four EPL clubs are part of the top 8 of the revenues - whereas the most other clubs in Spain or Germany might not be minors like Maccabi or Malmö but are somewhere between 10 and 25 with less than 50 % of the budget of the top clubs.
 
Balu said:
So what's the conclusion? The PL was throughout the decade the most predictable and least competitive league out of the top 4, yet I'm sure we all would agree that it was the greatest league in the world for most of those 10 years.
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United were the main reason for that. Followed by Arsenal and Chelsea (from the mid 00s). The vast majority of Caf members support United (unsurprisingly), with Arsenal and Chelsea being the best represented (along with Liverpool, granted) of the oppo teams.

Conclusion: The bias is quite predictable. If you ask an average Villa or Sunderland supporter how grand and entertaining the PL was in those years, they'll probably give you a very different answer.

Anyway, I'm not sure how many reasonable (not extremely partisan or plain deluded) fans on here would insist that the PL was more entertaining or competitive than other leagues during the years you highlight. The dominance of a small handful of teams during those years (and beyond, for that matter) is well known, after all. Nor am I sure how many besides the deluded would claim that the current PL is better than la Liga (or even the Bundesliga). More entertaining and/or competitive doesn't amount to better - and reasonable fans recognize this.

As a side note, one could also mention that many posters on here simply don't follow other leagues - and certainly not very closely. Their ideas about the quality is therefore often uninformed. But even among that group I would think that only a minority (albeit probably a vocal one, typically enough) insist on the superiority of the Premier League. Among non-idiots on the Caf the Sky (and now BT) hyping of the league has been a considered a joke for years. When some posters get defensive about English football it may actually be because the reaction to this hype has been taken too far - and because a certain subset of United fans, in particular, have a bizarre need to practically wallow in how far behind both United and the English game in general are compared to the progressive clubs and leagues on the continent.
 
Born2Lose said:
2016
1 Spain | 94.999
2 Germany | 74.749
3 England | 72.284
4 Italy | 68.439

Saw these coefficients in another thread and think it's about right, Spain miles ahead of the rest. There are always anomalies of course, such as 3 English teams going through in the CL vs Germany's 2 but overall it makes sense.
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This is heavily due to Spain's success and England's failure in the Europa League. It may get worst too, as financially the Europa League is far from as important as PL positions are. The argument being that, at least from a financial perspective, it is a safer bet to focus on the PL and disregard or at least place Europa at a far distant second. The new TV deal is only going to exasperate this.

What the PL definitely is lacking right now is top, top draw superstar players. But this goes back to what we all agree on - the top 4 teams are weaker than they were 7 years ago.

Again, I see this changing in the next three years. I have absolute belief that City are going to become a monster of a team and win the CL soon. Simply because of the way the owners are continuing to sink money into them - both short term (players) and longterm investments (training ground, stadium).

City have a good squad and will eventually have one comparable to anyone in europe.

United can only get better. We will spend big again in the summer. Unfortunately, we are absolutely light years off the top 3 in europe. I don't see us closing that gap for a few years. It would take hundreds of millions well spent.

Arse are losing up the purse strings n recent years. They will close the gap somewhat in future years. Thein finances are ballooning.

Chelsea - really depends on whether Abramovich decodes to sink some cash in or not. They have a new stadium coming. He will be hurting from low oil prices and Russia's economic woes.

By most sensible predictions, the gap between the PL top 4 and the European top 4 has hit it's peak in the last year or two. Ronaldo, Messi, Robben are not getting younger. There is a bumper TV payday for the PL coming. In the next three years there is plenty to suggest that the gap will be closed.
 
C'est Moi Cantona said:
You were just rubbing your hands waiting to bump this thread weren't you.:)

My original point was how the league is looking poor given how the 'top teams' are looking very average within it, maybe I was wrong in that the prem has just got a higher standard amongst the lesser teams nowadays making our top clubs look average, but tbf United have been woeful in Europe, City have struggled against the best team in their group, and Arsenal and chelsea have been far from convincing, if any of them come up against decent opposition they'll be beaten over 2 legs imo.

Maybe my original point should have been the premiership is maybe a high standard overall, but of a lower standard amongst the bigger teams than it should be, maybe that would have been fairer.
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:D

I will give you that the standard of Barca RM and Bayern are at a higher level than the top teams of the PL but for the league as a whole I still believe the Liga and the PL are the strongest leagues and no doubt will upset the Germans again but they have it too easy with their 34 game season , winter break, no league cup etc and yes I do know that the winter break has not yet started.
The current PL reminds me of the 1960s when loads of teams kept beating other teams and many teams had a chance of winning the championship. it didn't mean that the league was weak because of that.
 
Born2Lose said:
2016
1 Spain | 94.999
2 Germany | 74.749
3 England | 72.284
4 Italy | 68.439

Saw these coefficients in another thread and think it's about right, Spain miles ahead of the rest. There are always anomalies of course, such as 3 English teams going through in the CL vs Germany's 2 but overall it makes sense.
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I don't get the fuss to be honest. Right now it's correct, but it won't last forever. Italy had a heyday, so did England, now it's Spain's turn. That's just how it goes, so what.
 
El Zoido said:
I don't get the fuss to be honest. Right now it's correct, but it won't last forever. Italy had a heyday, so did England, now it's Spain's turn. That's just how it goes, so what.
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There's a "fuss" about it simply because it's funny that most PL fans have taken a long time to accept that reality. Plenty still don't.
 
It's the most entertaining league by far even if the overall quality is a bit crap right now.
 
The league is hugely lacking in star players.
Of the 23 nominees for the Ballon d'Or, only 5 are from the premier league. 3 of them at city, sadly for us.
 
Watched only our game and City's game on MOTD so far. I think the average level is decent but at the top end it's piss poor in comparison to other leagues. We conceded a heap of chance. City would have been fortunate to even get a draw from the highlights. Took a jammy goal to win it. Last week Arsenal's win against Sunderland looked nowhere near convincing.
 
saivet said:
Watched only our game and City's game on MOTD so far. I think the average level is decent but at the top end it's piss poor in comparison to other leagues. We conceded a heap of chance. City would have been fortunate to even get a draw from the highlights. Took a jammy goal to win it. Last week Arsenal's win against Sunderland looked nowhere near convincing.
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Bearing in mind that Swansea's form is dire & they don't even have a manager, City should have swatted them.
 
VorZakone said:
I don't feel the Bundesliga overall is better than the PL. For me the PL is still #2. Sure, Bayern would beat every PL team and probably Dortmund in this form too but overall the PL is better I'd say. Wolfsburg going through instead of Man Utd won't change my opinion. La Liga is still the best.
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I agree with that assessment. I obviously don't watch as much of the Bundesliga as you, but the order for me is:

1. La Liga


2. Premier League
3. Bundesliga

La Liga is for me has pulled away as the best league and that has been the case for a number of years now. It's top teams are the best, it's got the best players, and the league is strong all the way through.
 
amolbhatia50k said:
I agree with that assessment. I obviously don't watch as much of the Bundesliga as you, but the order for me is:

1. La Liga


2. Premier League
3. Bundesliga

La Liga is for me has pulled away as the best league and that has been the case for a number of years now. It's top teams are the best, it's got the best players, and the league is strong all the way through.
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Manucho is currently playing in La Liga.
 
amolbhatia50k said:
Rooney is the main man for Manchester United.
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FFS. The fact that you're making this point shows the weaknesses of the league. Sure he's not up to the level he once was and he shouldn't be the main striker but how can you even put current Rooney anywhere near Manucho?

Hes regressed even beyond that.
 
Twigginater said:
FFS. The fact that you're making this point shows the weaknesses of the league. Sure he's not up to the level he once was and he shouldn't be the main striker but how can you even put current Rooney anywhere near Manucho?

Hes regressed even beyond that.
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Rooney is playing that badly but still manages to be a star at a big club like United. I was just matching a poor point made by you.

La Liga has been the best league around for awhile.
 
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