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The debate about which league is the best in the world is boring, but that doesn’t mean that the arguments for the Premier League are irrelevant. The major draw of the Premier League over other leagues such as La Liga has been that, over the last decade, in England the league has been more competitive. And it’s true; in comparison to the duopoly in Spain our league is competitive. The recent influx of foreign money to has made the title race and competition for Champions League places a tighter affair and the same can be said of clubs further down the table too such as Queens Park Rangers. However, despite this perceived increased competitive edge certain facts suggest that this isn’t true.
For example at Christmas last year Wolves were only a point away from their current total yet they were bottom of the league. This year they sit in seventeenth , two points ahead of the drop zone and five clear of last year’s position. Obviously this alone is not the be all and end all but there are other issues too. You can look at the league and see very little between the teams but it was like that last year and what we can take from this is that all of the teams who were in the relegation zone last year would currently sit above it this year. The difference is that teams from both the upper and lower halves of the table have been performing worse.
We also have to consider what it is to be ‘competitive’. Is competition within our own league enough to make the fact that the league is competitive a positive attribute? Or has the demise of both of the Manchester club’s European campaigns helped to emphasise the demise of the strength of quality in English football?
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When a small team beats a top club we all like to say that our league is so exciting and anyone can beat anyone, and this is true, but when you have the top clubs like Manchester United, Chelsea and Arsenal all conceding five or more goals against their rivals in a single game you have to come to the conclusion that it is less a case of the bottom teams getting better and more a case of the top teams getting worse.
Yes, Manchester City’s rise has made the top of the table more competitive, as has Spurs’, but does that sentiment ring true if the clubs who were previously thought of as ‘top’ clubs appear to be in some sort of demise? And what sort of statement do we as a country send out to the continent if our top two clubs can’t even make it out of the group stages of the Champions League.
If our league was, as everyone seems to suggest, becoming more of a tightly run contest then why do the bottom clubs have fewer points than they did at this stage last year and the top clubs have more? In fact, after the Boxing Day games last year Manchester United topped the table with 37 points. This year Manchester City are top with 45 points. Moreover, the top five teams all have more points than the same stage last year and the bottom five teams all have fewer points. Therefore you can only come to the conclusion that the league is less competitive than it was last year, and all this in despite of the fact that teams like Arsenal and Chelsea are performing far worse than they were twelve months ago.
Believing they hype from fans and watching the build up to games on Sky Sports might have you in some sort of montage induced frenzy thinking that this is the year that your team can scale new heights, but when you look at the facts it appears that our league is more dominated by the few than ever, it is just that those teams are not the same ones as last year.
Follow me on Twitter @H_Mackay
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