It is often said that the Premier League is the most competitive league in the world and what is especially irritating about this fallacy is the certainty in which it is stated.
It’s as if a comprehensive and incredibly complicated study has been conducted at some point in time, one that oddly received no media coverage at all. A study that concluded beyond all reasonable doubt that the Premier League is the most competitive league in the world.
If this silly inaccuracy exasperates however, it is nothing to its cousin, that sometimes is used in its place.
On any given day, any team can beat anybody in this league.
Just looking at it there on the page boils the blood, but at least this axiom stands up, even if it is pithy and annoying.
Any team can beat anybody in the Premier League because - hold the front page- football is a sport.
But back to the misnomer that the English top-flight is without whipping boys, and moreover is a veritable level playing field compared to its European counterparts.
Last season, Barcelona won La Liga at a canter, racking up 88 points all told. But they were still undone at Almeria and Valladolid on route, teams that finished in the bottom four, picking up seven points less than Blaugrana combined.
The season before, it was Real Madrid who stormed to the title, winning it with several games to spare. Yet they were held both home and away by Cadiz, a side that twice upended the football odds despite avoiding relegation on the final day.
The 2023/24 Serie A campaign meanwhile is just a mere couple of weeks old and already newly promoted Genoa and Frosinone have beaten Lazio and Atalanta respectively.
Similar examples exist in France and Germany, just as they do in England and that’s because sport will always throw up the occasional surprise outcome.
To extend on that though, and suggest that the Premier League is a robust, healthy chain of clubs minus any weakest links is little short of ludicrous.
Take last year’s patsies Southampton, who only managed to beat teams in the lower half of the league all term as they plummeted to the Championship.
Champions Manchester City had no trouble dispensing with them twice-over and both times handsomely too, and they weren’t alone either. By the end of a sorrowful season, the Saints conceded 3+ goals on 13 occasions.
Sticking with the extreme example of an eventual champion twice taking on a team that finishes rock-bottom we find scant evidence of Davids acquitting themselves well against Goliath.
Indeed, in the past decade the scorelines read as follows: 4-0, 4-1, 5-0, 4-0, 1-0, 1-0, 4-1, 1-0, 6-1, 3-0, 3-2, 3-0, 1-0, 5-1, 3-2, 1-1, 2-1, 1-0, 2-3, 4-2.
That’s 18 wins, one draw and one loss. To save you from counting, that’s an aggregate scoreline of 58-15.
And now we have Luton Town, another easy game for the big boys to routinely pick up three points from. If you think that’s somewhat unfair incidentally then consider backing the Hatters in the online betting the next time they encounter top six opposition. We double-dare you.
The sad truth is that the division in the division is widening all the time, with the rich and powerful getting more and more rich and powerful, and the rest increasingly making up the numbers and to illustrate this we only need look at the points gap between the top two and the bottom three down the years. It’s nigh-on doubled since 1992.
There are the haves and the have-nots and yes, this inevitably results in easy games.
*Credit for all of the photos in this article belongs to AP Photo*
