Why the best league in the world, the Premier League is slowly being ruined?

The Barclays Premier League, it is known around the world as the greatest league in the world simply because it is the most competitive. However, this is changing with Man City winning the title last year by just spending hundreds of millions of pounds since the new owner came in. Chelsea are spending like crazy too since Roman Abramovich came in, especially with the signing of Fernando Torres nearly two years ago who as we all know cost £50m. What a signing he was.

The clubs who have got an endless amount of cash, will obviously win the titles and this is taking the competitive edge out of the game with clubs like  Wigan, West Brom and Norwich etc not standing any chance of winning anything. Those clubs don’t have the financial capacity to compete with the big spenders. In this season’s transfer window, Chelsea spent nearly £87m on players like Hazard, Oscar etc, compared to West Brom spending just under £4.5m or Wigan’s £9m.

In total the Premier League clubs spent £490m on players.

West Brom have done especially well this season, especially considering they have got a brand new coach and spent so little money on players. At the minute we are sitting fifth in the league, I don’t think we will stay there for long, and we play Chelsea next week. The Baggies have been the stand out team this season because of our performances under Steve Clarke, we are over performing so West Brom are the only exception to this rule so far this season.

Liverpool spent £35m on players and on Brendan Rodgers and look where they are. They did draw with Chelsea on Sunday, but that was lucky, Chelsea dominated the game from start to finish. For Liverpool, they actually need to spend more money to compete with the best which they believe they should be.  Liverpool need to spend money to bring in better players, but I will talk more about Liverpool on another post.

If clubs like West Brom, Wigan, Norwich spent £20, £30m on a player, they would be in debt instantly and that is even if they could fork out the money in the first place. Surprisingly, City only spent £56m in the transfer window, which is a lot of money for us, but not a lot of money for them. Don’t City have enough quality players to win the titles, they need to stop spending money and spend more time focusing on building a team spirit that will win them the title season after season.

Chelsea who spent the most in the transfer window really needed to spend the money considering they let Drogba leave for free. Chelsea are trying to buy young quality players for a lot of money, where as Utd spend a few million on young players like Nick Powell who cost £4m from Crewe. Spending the amount of money Chelsea, Liverpool, Arsenal, City etc ave over the past few years is disrespectful to the smaller clubs in the same league as them.

You can always predict who will be in the top four, five or six, and then you have the rest of the teams.

Everton have got past over the last 10 years under David Moyes by spending little amounts of money apart from this transfer window in which they spent £15m. Everton are a growing team under Moyes, and if they did have the financial ability to go out spending £30m on a player they would be further up the league table like they are this season. This is why Moyes is on Utd’s wishlist for the next man to replace Sir Alex Ferguson.

Unlike Everton, some clubs won’t be happy with the return of the amount of money they spent like QPR. QPR like the past few windows, have spent millions and in the summer they spent £18m, they spent £9m on Estaben Graneron who has turned out to be a good player for the R’s but has he been worth his price tag.

Another club that won’t be happy with their return is Southampton who broke their transfer record no once but twice to try and stay in the division, and so far they are failing to do so. They broke their transfer record by spending £7m on Jay Rodriguez, and £12m on Gaston Ramirez, this shows that they want to bring in young new talent and want to build for the future but they want the best young players and will pay anything to get their hands on young stars.

All of this reduces competition in the league, look at the Spanish league. There are two contenders every year, Real Madrid and Barcelona and they spend millions on players and there is no competition in that league, Madrid and Barcelona kill off their opponents 99% of the time. In Germany, you have Bayern Munich and Borussia Dortmund who have spent a lot of money along with Schalke and they are always the three top teams in German football.

In Italy, you have Juventus, Ac Milan and Inter Milan who are the big spenders and they are always in the Champions League and it is ending competition in Serie A. In Russia, you have Anzhi who have recently become one of the big spenders in European football, and in a few years time they will be the team to beat in the Champions League.

If teams could just spend less money, we would bring competition back into the game. We miss competition, it is predictable who will win matches by how much money they have spent in the window. If we don’t stop now, when will we stop?