So says Goal.com's Peter Staunton:

Soulless and self-serving Premier League must face up to grim reality


After a season marred by controversy and a failure of its top teams to put up a credible Champions League challenge, the world's supposed best league is falling behind

COMMENT
By Peter Staunton

It is increasingly difficult to ignore that gnawing perception that something is amiss. It is becoming harder and harder to dutifully accept that what we are watching is an elite level of sport and to blithely acquiesce to that propaganda message. We are gathering the fall-out of a season which, all things considered, must rank as one of the most humbling in the history of the English Premier League.

The season just past could have carried with it a number of important messages to the Premier League. The twin spectres of racism and hooliganism, as well as a palpable decrease in on-field quality, should have forced the English top flight to countenance some severe home truths. But on it trundles with "talking points" dissected and analysed. On it trundles with swaggering belligerence and little accountability. On it trundles with its insularity and conceit unchecked.

Excuses cannot legitimately be conjured for failures in Europe. Clubs at the middle and lower end of the table are more prosaic and insipid than ever. The national team inspires only apathy; production of worthwhile young talent askew. Loyal club supporters are increasingly weary about the money being siphoned from their pockets. Decisions are being taken at boardroom level in spite of them and not because of them.

English football, frankly, is lucky that its fans are not yet turning away in their droves such is the degeneration within the English Premier League. If you admire English football it is high time to ask some serious questions of it.

Manchester United, Uefa's 15th-best team based on 2012-13 coefficients, have just strolled to the Premier League title. They earned more points than their 1999 predecessors but you will not find many people claiming Cleverley, Valencia and Jones are better than Keane, Beckham and Stam.

Arsenal finished the league season in pre-eminent form but they claimed only seven points against their rivals in the top six across the campaign and, like United, could barely punch their weight in Europe. They could not, either, hang domestically with Chelsea - a team smashed to pieces by Atletico Madrid and Juventus before surrendering meekly their Champions League title.

Based on the evidence of the performance of the elite teams in the Champions League, the standard is dropping. For the first time since 1996, no English team progressed to the quarter-finals. That should be treated as a warning and not as a blip.

From 2005 to 2012 only one edition of the tournament contained no English side at the semi-final stage. Through the period 2007 to 2009, England's Premier League filled nine of 12 possible semi-final slots. At times it looked like the English would never be caught. The big four of Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool and Manchester United were the world's big four.

Not these days. Recent interlopers to that group, Manchester City, have scarcely made a dent in the Champions League despite a wage budget about twice that size of Borussia Dortmund's - the upstart team who took four points off them in the group stage and who have progressed all the way to the final. The positive form at Tottenham, Everton and Liverpool suggests that, maybe, some other team may have a crack at it next season.

The Gunners' divergence in form against the best and the rest, as well as United's facile saunter, suggest that the also-rans in the division are no longer capable of competing to any sort of equitable standard. Plainly, the league no longer provides adequate footing for the top clubs to prepare for Champions League competition.

The teams from positions eight to 17 are the very definition of middling and were separated by only 10 points at the end of the campaign. Across the last two seasons, only Reading have been promoted and failed to stay up. That was certainly not the trend a few seasons back. Ricky Lambert and Grant Holt have taken the Premier League by storm despite playing at the lower level of the league pyramid the majority of their careers. Have these teams and players reached Premier League quality or has Premier League quality reached them?

Continue reading here.