The English Premier League, by common consensus, is easily the most followed football tournament in world football. Teams from the league have hundreds of millions of fans from every corner of the globe, who bay for the blood of opposition teams each weekend and cheer on their favourite teams – whether they are watching the games on TV, or are inside the stadium and watching the game live. Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal and Chelsea replica jerseys are some of the commonest t-shirts found worldwide.
In this piece, we examine why the league has such a huge following, and because of what reasons the attractiveness of the Premier League is grounded in.
#1 Greatest amount of talent
While the Real Madrids and Bayern Munichs of the world can claim to attract just the world’s very best players, there are way too many excellent players plying their trade in the Premier League for any other league in the world to match its level of glitz and glamour.
Nearly every Premier League squad has at least one attacker capable of troubling any defense in the world. The concentration of world-class players is higher in the better-placed clubs (read: the Premier League top 7), but there is a sense that each team in the league can look to at least one go-to player, who can dig them out of a hole on a given day.
Mesut Ozil, Sergio Aguero, Riyad Mahrez, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Kevin de Bruyne, Dimitri Payet, David Silva, Eden Hazard, Diego Costa.......the list of world-class players in the Premier League is easily the longest out of any European league.
#2 Best managers in the world
The importance of a manager to a football club can never be overstated. Such is the role of top-level club football managers today that they are considered responsible for nearly all of the club’s activities – they certainly are answerable for the same to tough questions from the media.
This Premier League season is seeing a sea of world-class managers converging into the league to ply their trade here. Apart from Jurgen Klopp, Claudio Ranieri, Arsene Wenger, Mauricio Pochettino and Ronald Koeman, who have all been managing in the league for some time (particularly Wenger), this season saw Mourinho make a comeback to the league after his sacking from Chelsea.
As if that were not enough, Chelsea and Manchester City succeeded in roping in Pep Guardiola and Antonio Conte, who have been 2 of the most successful coaches in the Serie A, La Liga and Bundesliga in the recent past. This tasteful managerial menagerie is making for a thoroughly entertaining Premier League season, distinguishing it from any other league in the world.
#3 Best atmosphere and best fanbases
England is home to the world’s best fanbases, because, after all, football was supposed to be an English game. Xavi Hernandez, who played for all of his European career in the biggest stadium in Europe (at the Nou Camp), acknowledged this when he said “Sheffield United have 20,000 fans in the third division. That’s incredible. You only get that in England. I watched some of a game with Charlton the other day. There was football on television, yet the stadium was packed with supporters. Incredible.”
Football fans who can only watch Premier League football through cable TV can testify to the raucousness. Old Trafford is the obvious fans’ favourite for the sheer volume of noise that the fans generate in that stadium, but the rest of the league has some iconic stadiums which are renowned for having passionate supporters and fanbases. This makes for a great television viewing experience and is one of the reasons why the Premier League is a superior watch for football fans.
#4 Exhaustion factor and wild winter period
While most leagues in Europe (including the Bundesliga, the Serie A, the French Ligue 1 and the Spanish Primera Liga) have a mandatory winter break ranging from 2 weeks to around a month, the British football season does not have one.
Some of the most memorable Premier League encounters of all time have taken place in this period of time. Fans are generally treated with quality Premier League football on Boxing Day, New Year’s Eve and also on 2nd January, ensuring that the football fever does not lose its grip over football followers.
The effects of the lack of such a break are felt by teams from the league in the last legs of the season. This is a period when the players are exhausted by their season-long exertions, but they have to finish the season strongly in order to preserve their hard work of the past.
This leads to many wildly unpredictable, thrilling games at both ends of the table, leading to greater interest being generated. The rest of the European leagues are not nearly as exciting during the close-season as the Premier League, and this gives them an edge over the others.
#5 No easy games
It has been an oft-repeated dialogue, but only because it rings true from all perspectives. Even the worst-off relegation battlers in the Premier League can claim to have a realistic chance in a game against the table toppers at any point in the season. This unpredictability adds an entirely different zing to every single match.
Teams like Stoke, Southampton, Everton and Swansea have, over the past decade, troubled the Champions League teams on numerous occasions, and have picked up a number of points at the expense of the big Liverpool, Manchester and London clubs.
In the 2015-16 season, West Ham, who are a traditional yo-yo club (clubs that swing between divisions are termed as yo-yo clubs), beat Liverpool to grab 6th spot on the Premier League table and did so with less than half the transfer spending of the Merseysiders. This just goes to show how well-contested the league is. No other league in the world is as hard-fought as the Premier League.
# 6 Charisma
The United-Arsenal rivalry, which dominated much of the late 90s and early noughties Premier League, brought in an entirely new wave of fans from different parts of the world onto the Premier League bandwagon. The presence of players like Beckham, Roy Keane, Henry, Patrick Vieira and the likes on each side created a cult following that has refused to die down even in South Asia, Africa and South America.
The presence of such charismatic players, engaging in weekly battle for supremacy, was a big bonus to the Premier League, which only boomed financially after the turn of the century with increases in television revenue. This, above all, differentiates the Premier League as superior to the rest of Europe’s leagues.
