Who’s The Top Gun ???

Can this really be happening? Is the Premier League really the best football league in the world? With all the media hype on how great the Premiership is, maybe we should take a step back and have a real good look at the Premiership.

The reason why I say this is it all comes down to your own perspective, by which I mean what country do you come from and what team do you support. With all these two base factors to consider it is quite easy to say that if you come from England and support Manchester United, you would probably say that the best league in the world is the Premiership. But if we cut out these factors and try to look at it without bias, which league would come out on top? With this in mind we’ll take a look at what I think are the top five League in the world, The Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, Ligue 1 and the Bundesliga.

To break this down I will be taking in to consideration the three main points, which league has the richest football clubs? who has the best players? and who has won the most cups recently?
Firstly we will look at which league has the richest football clubs. According to The Deloitte Football Money League which shows the top twenty richest clubs for 2008/09, there are seven clubs from England, Germany has five, Italy has four and Spain and France have two each. Now as we all know money is not everything (but it does help) the more money the teams have, the more completive the league will be.

Let’s take a glance at the top ten richest clubs, (remember this is not taking into account how rich the chairman is, this is about how much the football club make as a business)

1. Real Madrid €401.4m
2. Barcelona €365.9m
3. Manchester United €327.0m
4. Bayern Munich €289.5m
5. Arsenal €263.0m
6. Chelsea €242.3m
7. Liverpool €217.0m
8. Juventus €203.2m
9. Internazionale €196.5m
10. AC Milan €196.5m

I think the Premiership win’s this one with four teams out of the top ten.

Now lets look at who has the best players. When I was younger it was all about Serie A they had the best players such as Ruud Gullit, Marco van Basten and George Weah.
Serie A is not as strong as it used to be, they still have good players but most of them are claiming their football pension . The French and German leagues don’t have that many stars either, so it really comes down to Spain and England.
I go with Spain here with players such as Messi, Kaka, Xavi, Ineista and Cristiano Ronaldo just too mention a few. To back my point take a look at the shortlist for the top ten European football players 2008/2009 also known as the Ballon d’Or.

Didier Drogba (Ivory Coast, Chelsea)
Samuel Eto’o (Cameroon, FC Barcelona & Inter Milan)
Steven Gerrard (England, Liverpool)
Zlatan Ibrahimovic (Sweden, Inter & FC Barcelona)
Andres Iniesta (Spain, FC Barcelona)
Kaka (Brazil, AC Milan & Real Madrid)
Lionel Messi (Argentina, FC Barcelona)
Cristiano Ronaldo (Portugal, Manchester United & Real Madrid)
Wayne Rooney (England, Manchester United)
Xavi (Spain, FC Barcelona)

Spain has six players in this shortlist and Lionel Messi won!!

Finally we will take a look at who has won the most cups recently. Here is the list of the last ten winners of the Champions League.

2009 – FC Barcelona
2008 - Manchester United FC
2007 – AC Milan
2006 – FC Barcelona
2005 - Liverpool
2004 - FC Porto
2003 – AC Milan
2002 - Real Madrid CF
2001 – FC Bayern Munich
2000 – Real Madrid CF

Spain wins this one with four out of the last ten winners.

So according to the the three main points Spain wins two out of three, which I think is just about fair. Until the Premier League gets some more world class players and wins some more Champions Leagues it will just fall short of La Liga.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 29th, 2010 at 4:05 pm. It is filed under Football, Sport and tagged with Bundesliga, Football, La Liga, Ligue, Premier League, Serie A. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.