The Premier League dominates the world of football.
A billion people watch the biggest clashes between Manchester United, Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool, and 500 million is a common viewing figure for games featuring those clubs.
Crowds are phenomenal in England, even in the Championship. Reading got 24,000 when they played Blackburn. Derby got 33,000 and they were only playing Fulham ! And Sunderland got 45,000. Sunderland beat West Ham 2-1 in front of 45,690 people. Two small airlines have sprung up in Ireland to fly fans to games at Sunderland.
Last year three of the four semi-finalists were English clubs. This year four of the quarter finalists are English clubs.
The legends of the 20th century club football have crumbled away. Real Madrid, Juventus, Bayern Munich and Ajax don’t get to finals any more, or even quarter finals.
Real Madrid are rubbish these days. Less than a month ago the once-mighty Madrid, the most successful club in the competition’s history, went out of the Champions League at the first knockout stage for the fourth year in a row. They were beaten 2-1 by Roma at the Bernabeu and went out 4-2 on aggregate.That’s what I call consistency : Real Madrid were knocked out of the Champions League in the Round of 16 for the fourth year in a row.
Our top four are the best four teams in Europe.
It’s an amazing thing that we now take for granted. We live in a very hyped-up football culture, we’re bombarded with “news” stories about our big clubs all day every day, so we don’t really notice that the best four teams in Europe are Man Utd, Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool. The Spanish clubs can’t compete, the Italians have collapsed after a massive match-fixing scandal that disgusted fans everywhere.
This EPL upsurge had been coming for a while. It’s been building up, arguably, since Man Utd did the treble in 1999.We are now dominating world football because we have the money to hire most of the most talented players on the planet and we have the biggest crowds.
However, our domination isn’t the issue. The real issue is how long the EPL bubble will last. Will the interest be sustained? Will investment by foreign billionaires continue? And what effect would the bursting of the bubble have on our Big Four ?
We don’t think about that stuff much.
Instead, we live from match to match. We talk about how Toure is doing at right back, about Torres and Adebayor, about Totti being unfit for tonight’s Roma v Man United game, about Hicks and Gillett asking to be seated separately at the Emirates. We look at Barcelona, with one win in seven, and wonder if they could lose to Schalke.
CORRECTION : Average gates in Bundesliga are higher than Premier League. Thanks, Kevin !