Best league in the world?

The calendar has just hit August which normally means that I go into proper countdown mode for the start of the footy season.

But just like the FA Cup has lost its lustre, so also has Premier League football. True, a couple of teams are now finally making inroads into the top four, but the game has still become a boring spectacle compared to what it was 10 to 15 years ago. The stranglehold that 'the big four' have had on the English game has sucked the life out of it. How has this happened and what, if anything, can be done about it?

In one word, the cause of the malaise is m-o-n-e-y. Obviously Chelsea aren't the only big spenders in Europe but they were the ones who started the bandwagon in England of spending truly ridiculous sums of money on transfer fees and players wages and on maintaining an insanely big squad to boot. And as Chelsea splashed the cash year in and year out, it forced other clubs all over the country to try to do the same in order to compete.

Which of course led to so many clubs spending beyond their means and then getting into real financial jeopardy - and which also resulted in transfer fees reaching the stratosphere, pricing many clubs out of the market for bringing in new talent. Premier League football has increasingly become a battle of finances off the pitch as much as a battle on it. He who spends, wins. Or he who is allowed to go deeply into debt - such as Man Utd - wins.

It is not about building a team for the future, or developing young players, or creating loyalty. It is about spend, spend, spend - now, now, now - and the recession has not changed the landscape too much.

To restore the credibility and integrity of the game the Premier League needs to make some hard choices and to implement some sort of cap on what clubs spend on transfer fees and wages. Plus, also limit how much debt a club can take on as any old muppet can borrow til he chokes, provided he can find a fool dumb enough to lend to him - and we all know how that ends up, eventually...

One major issue is whether FIFA would have the guts and vision to institute such caps either globally, or all across Europe. Obviously it puts the Premier League at a huge competitive disadvantage if it implements such spending caps on its own and not in conjunction with the rest of Europe. Then again, if England started the ball rolling, how long would it take for other leagues to see sense and follow suit? This is something that really should come from FIFA, but the FA and Premier League may need to consider doing it on their own, for the good of the long-term future of the game.

It's one thing to propose a cap on outrageous spending on transfer fees and wages - it is quite another to come up with a workable plan for doing so. An idea mentioned in various circles that makes a lot of sense is to limit the amount that a club can borrow to a fixed percentage of annual turnover. This would alter the way that clubs like Liverpool and Man United conduct their business. It would similarly also make sense to limit clubs' transfer and wage budgets to a fixed percentage of their turnover. The League does not need more Portsmouth scenarios ,and this would help prevent that .

The league also does not need more Man Citys and Chelseas ,just spending their way to the top because the can. That is not football and that is not competition. That is just bland, soulless tripe. The Premier League better get its act together and soon, because it is not the only game in town. These days La Liga makes for much more interesting viewing than the Premier League for the neutral, partly because of the dull and defensive nature of the English League, but also because of the spending behavior of English clubs or better stated the "Chelsification" of the Premier League.

The Premier League the best league in the world? You wouldn't know it from half empty stadiums and a distinctly average English national side.

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