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Good versus great in the EPL

By on March 12, 2015

The world of football is defined by small margins; and so, fractional differences between good and great teams define their success. In relative terms, a good team will have a decent shot at winning their domestic league and be considered a contender in the Champions League. A great team, meanwhile, should sweep their domestic league and be odds-on favorites to win the Champions League. The difference: there are lots of capable, good teams, but great teams are a rare breed. Every decade, there may be only two or three; most recently, Barcelona under the guidance of Pep Guardiola. Good teams can win the Champions League — Chelsea won the UCL in 2011/2012 while finishing sixth in the Premier League — but typically only in the absence of a great team.

What helps make the Premier League the most popular league in the world is its sheer volume of good teams. In Germany, only Bayern Munich, Borussia Dortmund, and occasionally Schalke have gone far in the Champions league in recent years; in Spain we have Barcelona, Real Madrid, and recently Atletico Madrid. Whereas in the Premier League, Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester City, Manchester United, Tottenham Hotspur, and Liverpool all have the potential to make it to the knockout stages of the Champions League in a given year.

This highly competitive nature of the league is part of what it is known and revered for, as well as an annual top four race that is unrivaled among Europe’s top five leagues. Only Italy can claim to come close to such with five or six consistently quality teams: Juventus, AS Roma, Internazionale, AC Milan, Fiorentina, and Napoli – though their Champions League success has been much more limited in recent years.

However, exactly what makes the Premier League so competitive, especially so in the past few seasons, has come under fire: their lack of a truly great team. Chelsea, the league’s biggest hope for an extended run in the Champions League this season, was just sent home in the Round of 16 after an unconvincing tie against Paris Saint-Germain, and already, critics are howling at the Premier League’s drop in quality.

Apparently, the league is already “falling short” in quality, simply because it lacks one memorable team. When comparing, say, La Liga and the Premier League’s “quality”, it generally boils down to whether Real Madrid or Barcelona have done better than the EPL’s “big six” in the Champions League, of late. But then, when those great teams come around, it creates a competitive inequality in the league that the very same critics often harp over. Great teams, such as Manchester United in the late nineties, Arsenal’s “Invincible’s”, and Jose Mourinho’s first Chelsea team all dominated on the European stage and showed the EPL in a glitzy, glamorous light — but at the same time creamed their domestic competition making for a less equal, competitive league.

La Liga and the Bundesliga, for instance, are undermined and criticized as leagues by the fact that their title races have consistently been dominated by great teams, in the recent past. Real Madrid and Barcelona (now, Atletico Madrid is entering the picture) have always been dominant on the European stage but make La Liga a one-trick pony. The same applies to an even bigger extent in Germany, where Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund dominate. Considering Dortmund’s recent struggles, Bayern are making a mockery of their domestic competition, winning the Bundesliga title by nineteen points last season and cruising to another title this year.

Between them, the two leagues have split the last three of the last four Champions League titles but attract far fewer attention than the Premier League as an unintentional side-effect.

So which do we want for the Premier League: a competitive league dominated by good teams, that allows clubs like Southampton to potentially shine, or one, possibly two, great teams that will flaunt the league’s status in Europe? Having one automatically sacrifices the other.

Photo credit: Tsutomu Takasu on Flickr

About Alex Morgan

Alex Morgan, founder of Football Every Day, lives and breaths football from the West Coast of the United States in California. Aside from founding Football Every Day in January of 2013, Alex has also launched his own journalism career and hopes to help others do the same with FBED. He covers the San Jose Earthquakes as a beat reporter for QuakesTalk.com and his work has also been featured in the BBC's Match of the Day Magazine.