JOE ACKLAM ATTEMPTS TO G ET TO THE BOTTOM OF WHAT MAKES ONE LEAGUE BETTER THAN ANOTHER…
SKY have been peddling the ‘best league in the world’ tag about the Premier League ever since they bought football in 1992.
An all-encompassing marketing campaign has led to the division becoming world sport’s most ruthless cash cow – as well as being an almost unrivalled spectacle on a week-to-week basis.
However, all of this begs the question: what makes one league better than another?
I think Sky was operating on the idea that the most important thing was quality, which clearly the Premier League has from top to just above where Norwich and Fulham finish every other year.
But until very recently, the best teams in the world were Spanish, with Barcelona and Real Madrid ruling supreme over the Champions League.
But you would be hard pushed to say that La Liga was the best league in the world because beyond three teams, the old ‘anyone can beat anyone’ moniker didn’t really ring true.
Was anyone going into Real Madrid vs Almeria thinking that the away side had any sort of chance of taking all three points? Then again, it’s not really the case in the Premier League these days, thanks to Manchester City’s Pep Guardiola and Liverpool’s Jurgen Klopp coming in with their annoying habits of being very good football managers.
I would say that the higher end quality has to be mixed with a strong level of competition throughout the whole division. Were it not for Bayern Munich, then it would be fair to say that the Bundesliga rates very strongly in this category.
Eintracht Frankfurt and RB Leipzig have both done very well in Europe this season. It may well help that virtually every team in the division is close to the teams directly above and below them. The issue is that the aforementioned Bavarian giants Bayern throw all of that off – and their ten consecutive titles proves it.
France has a similar issue with the team at the top – Paris Saint-Germain – being far removed from the rest of the division. This would leave us with just Serie A out of the major leagues. This season has had a captivating title race comprising many teams but only a short while ago Juventus were by far the dominant force.
The other issue would be the legacy of the league. Italy continues to live very much in the shadow of what it used to be, especially in the 90s. The top end talent in the league is a far cry from where it once was.
Perhaps the search needs to be expanded, but the next leagues in line, in Portugal and Holland, suffer from similar issues of a lack of competition.
Back on these shores, the Championship is always very exciting, but has begun to be slightly repetitive in its list of winners.
So, where does that leave us? The answer, and it is a disappointing one, is that no league does or can meet all the criteria that we want.
It is not feasible for a league to have both world-class teams at the top and also teams at the bottom who could realistically beat them.
It would be lovely for it to be possible, but, for many reasons, top players would not go and play for a team in danger of relegation, preferring a team with the prospects of winning silverware. You too could win by checking out this list of new casinos.
