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Do the Premier League’s riches outshine its quality?

By on June 3, 2015

The Premier League, for the nth season in a row, is by far the richest league in the world, surpassed the £3 billion mark in revenues for the first time. According to the Deloitte Annual Review of Football Finance, it outstripped the second richest league, the Bundesliga, by more than £1bn, and more than doubled the revenues of every other world league.

Since 2011, the Premier League’s revenue has doubled.  So, the question begs to be asked: why was not a single English team in the Champions League Quarterfinals? Why, if the Premier League makes double that of La Liga, does Spain beat England in UEFA’s associations’ club coefficients rankings? Germany, too, is catching up with England in the rankings. How can the Premier League’s quality fall further behind when their profits soar ahead?

How Greg Dyke, the English FA, Roy Hodgson, the Premier League must wish there were a simple answer to this question.

Likely, the fact that the Premier League is becoming an importer of talent, instead of focusing on developing its own, plays a role in the issue. In 2014, the CIES Football Observatory found that the Premier League gave academy players the third fewest chances in the first team out of thirty-one European leagues and had the fifth lowest number of club-trained player (those who were with the club for at least three seasons between the age of fifteen and twenty-one). If England doesn’t show well in the Champions League, they’ll attract fewer international stars and the top clubs don’t have the trust in their academy talent to compensate.

This idea of “oven-baked talent” also seems to support parity in the Premier League. If they have twenty good teams they’ll financially be the best but won’t win the Champions League unless they have one great team. Real Madrid topped Deloitte’s Football Money League and Barcelona came in fourth. Between them, they’ve appeared in five of the last ten Champions League finals, including the upcoming match between Barcelona and Juventus, hence La Liga’s high UEFA Coefficient Ranking. However, while La Liga has the appeal of a few great teams, they lack the Premier League’s stable of “good” teams. Before the next richest Spanish club, Atletico Madrid, comes into the Football Money League picture, six Premier League clubs appear. Compared to La Liga’s three, the Premier League features fourteen teams in Deloitte’s list of thirty.

So a lot of it has to do with perception. Presumably, Hull City, the Premier League’s eighteenth placed team, should beat La Liga’s counterpart Eibar, coming from a town of only around thirty-thousand people, against the Premier League’s counterpart Hull City. Off the field, it would hardly be a contest between their brands.  However, we only ever get to see Barcelona, Real Madrid and Atletico Madrid take on the Premier League’s big five.

It’s really quite hard to get any details out of comparing the wealth and quality of play of a given league. Both can be decided by many different factors, particularly on the monetary aspects. The Premier League simply has a brand that the Bundesliga lacks, resulting in billions of more profit from television and sponsorship deals. England will hardly become a high-paid football wasteland anytime soon but certainly risks becoming worth more than where the football is at.

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.