The English Premier League is possibly the most fan-followed league in the soccer world. The league has been called “the greatest league in the world” time and time again. This notion comes from the different levels of talent that seem to always be shifting in the premier league. The adoption of the “best league” idea has been accepted for the past few years and it still remains a popular idea today. Unfortunately for the Premier League, this is changing.
The 2015/2016 season in the Premier League was a topsy-turvy one to say the least. Teams that “should” have done well finished lower in the table than anyone could have expected and teams that “should have been relegated made incredible runs towards the top of the table. Chelsea, the reigning champions of the 2014/2015 season, crumbled to a 10th place finish, 31 points behind the league winners. The champions of the league, Leicester City, had 5000 to 1 odds of winning the league in 2016 but managed one of the greatest Cinderella stories in the history of sports. This sent a shockwave around the world as the team with seemingly no chance, beat out all the big names and were crowned champions for the first time in their history. To take nothing away from Leicester City, their competition did not give them much of a fight. Leicester City only lost three matches in the 38 games they played during the season. One way to look at it is to say that Leicester were now a club to pay attention to but this is not the case if compared to the current league standings. At the time of this writing, Leicester is sitting in 15th place with 10 losses, over triple of their last season total. The quality of the Premier League has fallen to such a deep, inconsistent low, that a team can win the League one season and be facing relegation the next.
To look at it in a different light, the Champions League is a tournament that pits all of Europe’s greatest teams against one another. The tournament tries to bring all of the world’s best together to determine a winner of Europe every year. From 2006 to 2016, with the 2017 final to be played in May, an English team has only won the Champions League twice. The victories came in 2008 and 2012 and there has not been an English finalist since 2012. Of the last 10 finals played, there has been a Spanish champion six times. This fact alone should be enough to put the argument of the best league to rest. England simply cannot compete with other big names in Europe and they cannot stay consistent in their own league.
From a standpoint of pure soccer, English teams do not hold their own. A blatant lack of victories on Europe’s biggest stages have shown that the English sides have not been good enough in the past few years to be considered the best league in the world. The premier league may make more money than other leagues due to big television deals and ticket sales but looking at it simply for the soccer, England has a long way to go to regain the title of “best league in the world”.
