The English Premier League is undoubtedly the most astutely marketed league in all of world football. The best players play in Spain, the best fan experience is to be found in Germany and the old charm of the Serie A in Italy is still alive and well. Yet the powers that be have managed to convince most of the world that English football is where they should focus their gaze.
Almost all of that is down to the competitiveness of the English top division. With the huge influx of money from foreign and domestic TV deals, we’ve seen the likes of Stoke, Southampton and perhaps most notably Tottenham Hotspur throw caution to the win in the transfer market each and every season and build squads that can genuinely trouble the giants of the division.
As a result, very few leagues in Europe can claim to offer the constant exhilaration of not only a three or four-horse race for the league title, but also the sheer frenzy of any team being able to beat their opponents home or away on any given matchday. Well, at least that was the case before Pep Guardiola came to town.
On Saturday we watched his Manchester City side dispose of Stoke by seven goals to two with not only a fascinating gust of quality and class, but also a troubling degree of utter dominance. For perhaps the first time since he’d move to England, Guardiola’s team were playing like a Guardiola team. And as such they were dominating the league with a ruthless contempt that had been on show at both Barcelona and Bayern Munich.
And what’s wrong with that? Well, nothing if you’re a Manchester City, Barca or Bayern fan but what tends to follow Pep is a general malaise in attitudes towards a certain league or division once one team begins to dominate. Spanish and German fans are of course accustomed to one or two clubs snatching the limelight, but we haven’t yet seen how the Premier League - designed to be as competitive as possible - would deal with an imposed monopoly on success.
These are still early days, and a certain Mr Mourinho on the other side of Manchester may disagree with such a notion, but if Kevin De Bruyne & Co have finally kicked in to gear for the long haul then the Premier League may need to get its thinking cap on and come up with a new slogan. The most competitive league in European football may be on the cusp of losing it’s one, major selling point.
