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With Renewed Financial Backing It's Time Premier League Clubs Dominated In Europe
With the financial might of the Premier League becoming bigger, it's time the Champions League was won by an English team again.
beIN SPORTS
By Graham Ruthven (@grahamruthven)
Before every Champions League final UEFA raises the flag of each club’s homeland. Last year two Spanish Rojigualda went up the flagpole in Lisbon, as Atletico Madrid and Real Madrid contested club soccer’s biggest game. Real claimed an historic 10th European Cup title that night, but the match said something more profound - illustrated by the two flags fluttering in the Portuguese air.
European soccer’s show piece game is often taken as a gauge of the continent’s zeitgeist. It’s taken as something of a yardstick of which country and which league is the best at any given time. Right now, it’s La Liga - going on last season’s Champions League final - but it’s not so long since England was Europe’s dominant force.
When Chelsea and Manchester United made the competition’s final in Moscow back in 2008 the Premier League seemed to be on the brink of a generation of dominance. Even more so when three out of four semi-finalists the next season hailed from England’s top flight - ignoring that Barcelona, the one non-English side, won the competition in 2009.
And yet just two Premier League team have made the Champions League final since then (with Chelsea winning it in 2012). So why has English soccer struggled to build on what was, for a couple seasons at least, a supremacy?
It’s difficult to put the decline of the Premier League on the continent down to any one factor, with Chelsea now England’s most consistent Champions League club following the retirement of Sir Alex Ferguson and the subsequent demise of Man Utd as a European superpower.
Jose Mourinho’s side made the semi-finals last year, winning the Europa League the season before that. Yet Premier League champions Manchester City still seem uneasy with their status as newly fledged member of the European elite. It’s a tag that they are still uncomfortable with, although difficult draws have admittedly hindered City.
Meanwhile Arsenal perpetually find themselves trapped below something of a glass ceiling, progressing to the last 16 with relatively every season only to be eliminated by the first elite team they come up against. And thus the cycle repeats itself, season after season.
Given the financial might of the Premier League - which has just agreed a new domestic television deal worth over £5 billion - it’s reasonable to claim that its clubs are under-performing in continental competition. Particularly when compared alongside the success of teams like Atletico Madrid and Borussia Dortmund, who receive a fraction of the revenue English clubs are handed.
Even still, the Premier League struggles to compete with Spain’s big two in the transfer market, with Bayern Munich also big-hitters when it comes to challenging for the sport’s best talent. While England’s biggest club once had the pick of soccer’s great and good, now they themselves are suffering a talent drain. Cristiano Ronaldo, Gareth Bale, Luis Suarez; all have left the Premier League for Spain in recent years.
With the exception of Mourinho, it could also be claimed that the game’s best coaches have also shunned the Premier League. Carlo Ancelotti and Pep Guardiola are two of Europe’s most proven managers at Champions League level, and both have dominated the competition in recent years with Spanish and German sides.
Of course, the feat of two teams from the same country making the competition’s final is not always reflective of a more general zeitgeist. Look at how Borussia Dortmund and Bayern Munich reached the Wembley final two years ago, only for the German Bundesliga to become a tedious monopoly in the seasons that have followed.
With Atletico Madrid and Real Madrid contesting last season’s final in Lisbon the consensus is that Spain lead’s the European club game, with Barcelona also one of the continent’s finest and teams like Valencia and Sevilla also accomplished outfits.
Of the three Premier League teams still involved in the last 16 of the competition this season Chelsea look best-equipped to make the final, to played in Berlin this May. Mourinho is a master of European competition and has assembled a balanced and typically swaggering squad two seasons into his second coming at Stamford Bridge.
Elsewhere the usual names will likely populate the Champions League’s latter stages, with Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Real Madrid all frontrunners. The Premier League could do with a St George’s cross up the flagpole this season, though.