For some time now, the stock way to disregard and disrespect any league that isn’t the Premier League has been to call it a ‘Farmers’ League’. Paris Saint-Germain record a big win in Ligue 1? Farmers’ League, innit? Bayern Munich march on to another Bundesliga title? Farmers’ League, mate.
The Premier League? Why, that’s the ‘Best League in the World ™’.
So explain to The Sportsman why it is in the English top flight that most of the biggest margins of victory are happening these days. Why it’s in the ‘greatest league’ that the deficits between the top six and the rest – even the top two and the rest – are increasingly widening more and more compared to other divisions.
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Liverpool’s 9-0 win over AFC Bournemouth at Anfield on Saturday was widely heralded for the display of attacking football from the home side, and rightly so. The Reds could have scored far more than they did such was their absolute dominance. But the fact that this was the third such Premier League result in less than three years only serves to underline the chasm which has developed in England.
These days, all of those apparent measures which applied to the French and German leagues are increasingly evident in the Premier League. The average gap between first and third in the English top flight over the last five seasons has been 24 points, whereas in Ligue 1 and the Bundesliga it has been 17 apiece. The gap from first to seventh? That’s 38 in the Prem, 32 in France and 29 in Germany.
In Ligue 1 there have been two results of an eight-goal margin or greater in the last decade, against four in the Bundesliga and six in the Premier League. Huge victories for the bigger clubs are becoming more the norm than they are in so-called inferior leagues as the top division here gets increasingly predictable.
Even Bournemouth boss Scott Parker admitted that he wasn’t particularly shocked by the margin of defeat on Merseyside on Sunday, telling reporters afterwards: “I’m probably not surprised too much, to be honest with you in the sense of the levels that we’re playing against here and the quality. It’s just far greater than what we have at this present moment in time.
“I feel sorry for the players because at this moment we’re just a little bit underequipped for this level.”
So at what point does this issue get nipped in the bud? As time goes by, this is only becoming a greater issue for the English game. Bayern have won 10 league titles in a row, and both PSG and Manchester City have claimed four in the last five years. The punters who spend hundreds on season tickets and just as much on TV subscriptions won’t like the thought of it being true, but what they’re watching over here is the same product everybody is shunning from further afield.
The Premier League is near as damn it to uncompetitive these days. Gone are the times newly-promoted clubs could hope to finish in the top three as a string of them did in the early 1990s. The target is very definitely 17th now, and if the odd eight- or nine-goal defeat happens to appear on the list of results, well so be it so long as they steer clear of the bottom three.
Is this what we want our top division to look like? The money earned by teams in the Champions League has helped to build a massive gap between those touted for a European Super League breakaway and the rest. But if this is the alternative to such a game-changing plan, which of the two is really favourable? It’s worth thinking about the next time a team gets stuffed 9-0.
*18+ | BeGambleAware | Odds Subject to Change
