English Premier League Title is it only for Manchester United Chelsea and Arsenal
So Chelsea won the English Premier League title on the last day with the fight eventually coming down between Manchester United and the London Blues, that would not have taken a soothsayer to predict would it?
It has been 15 years since anybody other than these two and Arsenal have won the league and if you throw the one off by Rovers in 1995, the stat would look like 19 years and only 4 teams have won it, is that worth of being called a competition?
If there ever was a chance of piping the usual suspects off their perch it was this year with all three of them having patchy forms, far from their usual best and dropping too many points, but nobody else ever had a chance, none came even close enough. Should Spurs and City be congratulated for finishing where they did? No way! They both have spent over 150 million quid to strengthen their squads and yet never even came close to a challenge for the title.
Why would a team like Aston Villa be happy to finish sixth after their loyal owner injected over 138 million pound in the squad? Why has City with all their new found riches came close to challenge for the title? Why did Liverpool not surmount a sustainable challenge? It’s all really baffling.
How much more money would it take for someone to at least come within a point or two of the title?
Perhaps the problem is with the new generation that has grown up with that being the norm. The same teams winning the trophy year after year, the same teams challenging for the title year after year. So much so that it has become an institutionalized mentality.
In the same period just across the border in France and Germany 7 different teams have won the league while in Italy and Spain the trophy has rotated among 5 different teams, though the constriction is not just confined to the Ol’ Blighty it is much worse here. But more importantly and even more so refreshingly the trend is changing, at least in some countries.
Last year an un-fancied FC Twente won the Dutch Eredivise under the tutelage of Steve Mclaren, which is just like Sunderland or Birmingham winning the Premier League. In Germany a season ago Wolfsburg claimed a shock Bundes Liga title and this year only in France Marseille won the league for the first time since 1992.
It is not that the fate of the title is as predictable as sunrise: it’s that the challengers follow the same trend. In 1980s only Villa, Liverpool and Arsenal won the league but if you look at the teams that finished second and third you see it for yourself. Nottingham Forest, Ipswich, Villa, Southampton, Everton, Man Utd, Spurs, Liverpool, Watford, Arsenal, and West Ham were those teams that qualified for Europe in the 80s and the mix is quite diverse.
Since Blackburn won the league back in 1995 the teams finishing in the top has been United, Chelsea, Liverpool and Arsenal for three times, Newcastle and Leeds just once. That is 45 positions over a span of 15 years and only 6 teams. Is that worthy of being called a competition? To me it seems like it’s getting lesser of a competition with every passing year and becoming more like a cartel.
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