they farm iron ore!
The relative strength of the Premier League
- Thread starter Wumminator
- Start date
they farm iron ore!
Coal! Though if I'm not mistaken they manufacture(d) iron and steel.
I find Villa most embarrassing of all. You play entire year of league football aiming to finish top 6 and get into Europe only to then completely neglect Europe and field your B team.
Mate, this thread is obviously not about facts.
And fair enough back then, La Liga was also top quality. The PL's quality was relatively average from when Cristiano Ronaldo left until around 2017 or 2018. The money in the league plus the influx of best in class coaches and Messi and CR's powers waning in Spain meant the PL is at the top of the pyramid over the past 5 years or so. The problem with the PL is that it has the loudest fans and sometimes these fans mistake this superiority for completely dismissing other leagues which leads to a lot of resentment and overreaction from contrarians. The PL boasted the highest quality in the world in the late '00s and again now in the age of Klopp and Pep with Spain looking on top in the period inbetween. That's not controversial and the gap is not enormous by any means.
4 La Liga teams in the knockout rounds of the CL vs 2 English teams.
And 3 German teams!
As well as 3 Italian.And 3 German teams!
Sevilla didn't qualify though.
And 3 German teams!
I think its pretty obvious Liverpool would get out of any group and Villa or Spurs would get out of most of them. This year two of the ones who qualified last year have dropped off this year.
And will most likely still be an English team that wins it.
Only true about Liverpool and there are more chances of Villa and Spurs getting Embarrassed like United and Newcastle than make it out of most groups infact they might have struggled even in PL with CL commitments .
EPL fans are so weird. A United fan banking on Liverpool or City winning the UCL! There are no real rivalries in England
All friends league!
English teams back to being the best at wasting money on ultra expensive flop signings? At least in our and UTDs case. Can't really say that about Newcastle, more a thin squad and robbed by the ref v PSG.
Yeah, as a Leverkusen fan it is uninagimable to root for Bayern. But then again, United isn't really a competitor to City or Liverpool th way Bayern is to Leverkusen, maybe that's the root cause of it.
Leverkusen are perennial 5/6th place merchants. you may be top this year, but if you think Bayern see you as a rival, you're deluded.
Yes, that well known competitive rivalry between Bayern Munich and Bayer Leverkusen, that has seen the latter finish an average of 23.4 points behind the former over the past decade, including one season where Bayern had literally twice as many points as Leverkusen.
Five Spanish teams in the groups.
Hook, line and sinker. 
You might be correct, Bayern probably knows we're way too good for them
The past is the past!
I was expecting zero bites and now i am sad you scared the rest away.Hook, line and sinker.
I am not sure, City don't look good this season, Real Madrid are looking favourites.
Ah, this world renowned German humour!
If real life was like a platform game and Joselu could find a Ruud Van Nistelrooy effectivity potion maybe but in current circumstances I think Guardiola and City will get back to their usual self and win it again.
Wonder if Bellingham can carry us, is a lot to ask but that's the only way I see us going far in the competition.
Too kind of you! But don't be so modest, we are obviously not even remotely as good as United at making people around the world break out into laughter
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Ah, this world renowned German humour!
[/QUOTE]
They claim this kind of thing but whenever there is even slightly negative comment about German football they all gang up to respond.
They claim this kind of thing but whenever there is even slightly negative comment about German football they all gang up to respond.
[/QUOTE]
You probably should see it as a kind of sibling dynamic. You passionately hate each other and have a go at each other, but if someone else does it, than it's still your brother, and how dare you!?
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Yeah the strength through the league is gigantically overrated. There’s three top top teams a few good ones and then utter average shite. Us being 6th in the league with ten defeats is absolutely ridiculous. We’re an outrageously bad ‘football team’ and if the league was stronger throughout we’d be about 12th.This is my favorite thread to bump
While I disagree with your conclusion… I cannot deny that you have indeed presented a compelling piece of evidence.This is my favorite thread to bump
What exactly is that supposed to say? What metric are you using to evaluate the strength of a league? Because it seems like your metric is the gap between one club and the rest juxtaposed with an isolated result in Europe. If that so, what league passes this rigorous test of yours to claim being better?This is my favorite thread to bump
I remember a time back in 2011 when Barcelona and Real were competing with each other every weekend for who will win by a bigger margin. They were throwing by 4s and 5s and 6s. On the first leg of the last 16 in the CL that year, Barcelona lost 2/1 to an Arsenal side that was nowhere near the top of the PL. Did that make La Liga weaker then for you?
No league in the world would pass every test there is to make it the strongest as in having the best players, managers, teams AND having the level between the teams through the league close enough to make every round competitive. That's just impossible. The PL has produced 4 out of 6 CL finalists in the last 3 years and 6 out of 10 in the last 5 4 different ones. There is a higher concentation of the established elite managers throughout the league where you get European cup winners like Glasner managing relegation candidates. The title race is also much more competitive over the past 5 years than anywhere else where we had 1 year if I remember correctly that a team ran away it. More often than not, it's still close and all to play for come April which you can't say happens regularly in the other leagues with the odd exception. The quality of players is a tad overrated because of the money PL teams spend but overrated doesn't mean inferior, it just means it's probably not far and away ahead of the other leagues. Is the PL the best at everything with the best teams and competitiveness throughout the league week in week out? No but again no league has ever been or maybe will ever be. But it's still currently ahead of all other leagues because it's just better in more aspects than others.
The PL is a bit weaker right now since Chelsea went to shit and United's new project is faltering.
Barcelona had already won the CL (in 2009) and would win the CL that year, that's considerably different than Arsenal... and La Liga was weaker at the time, clubs were broke.
The irony is, that precise argument was used to argue against La Liga's strength, despite dominating European competitions during that time. The criteria just keeps changing to paint the PL as the best no matter what.
Well that depends on who you're listening to. I thought the PL was weak between around 2010 until 2017. It was won by Leicester, two Chelsea teams and two City teams that looked bang average when they faced the first decent side in Europe in terms of results AND performances. There was one or two standour managers and the likes of Bayern, Barcelona and Real had better players than any team in the PL could boast. So the teams were average compared to the best in Europe and the glamour was far behind the Spanish teams and Bayern and maybe even PSG.
Of course La Liga had clubs who were broke and the gap between the big two and the rest was ridiculous at times. But as I said in my original post, no league has ever had it all, there is always something to pick up and use as criticism that it's not perfect. My criteria is first and foremost, quality and the best evidence for that is performances and results in the continent in comparison to other leagues. From 2010 to 2017, the best teams were by far Real, Barcelona and Bayern with the likes of PSG, Juventus, Atlético behind and then one English team being on a distant 3rd tier. From 2017 to now, City and Liverpool have been at most points among the top with Real, Bayern, another English team like Chelsea or now Arsenal and maybe an Italian team like Napoli or Inter making up the top 5. To me that suggests high quality.
The other criteria is glamour and big names, names that people would turn in to watch. Italy had that in the '90s, Spain had it in most of the '00s and the '10s. Real look to be resurrecting it now but in the past 5 years they just didn't after losing Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. The English teams have not and never boasted the same level of box office names but in comparison, it still had/has the biggest names from players to managers. It's not a huge gap like Spain did over the rest but it's a gap for now.
La Liga was weaker than who? Clubs might have been broke but La Liga still produced the biggest names and best teams in the CL and EL at the time boasting the most glamorous games and narratives in the world. Just because it wasn't perfect on every front doesn't mean it didn't have a legitimate claim for being the best league in the world. Or at least, that no other league was better at the time.
Very odd bump, with zero context. Oh well, guess insecurity is real online.