Look at the best leagues in Europe – the ‘big five’. You have the Premier League, La Liga, the Bundesliga, Serie A and Ligue 1. They are the leagues that produce the most Champions League teams and definitely stand out as the best standard of football. (You may question the inclusion of France but it is improving, and still probably deserves its place above Holland and Portugal).
But let’s look closer at these leagues, and the competition within them.
Bayern Munich are as good as champions in Germany. They are so dominant that they are pretty much just using their league games as warm-ups for their assault on the Champions League. Wolfsburg, Bayern’s nearest competitors given the fall of Dortmund this season, lost at the weekend, and are now nine points behind the Bavarians.
Juventus are in a very similar boat in Italy. Roma could only draw with Chievo this weekend and so the Old Lady is sitting pretty. Juve are eight points clear of the teams behind, and a win tonight would put them 11 points to the good.
The Premier League is going a similar way to the others. Chelsea are reigning supreme, five points clear of Manchester City with a game in hand. That game in hand doesn’t come until late in April, but it is against lowly Leicester and Man City will need to pick up the pace very quickly if they are to catch up.
La Liga is more interesting, but settling back into the familiar pattern of a Classico duel after last season’s surprise win for Atletico Madrid. Barcelona are a point clear, capitalising on Real Madrid’s defeat in Bilbao on Saturday by winning 6-1 at home to Rayo Vallecano. It’s what we’ve come to expect – when the top two lose it’s a surprise, and they’ll run away with it again.
It is in France, surprisingly, where the most exciting race of the ‘top five’ is happening. Lyon top the table by a point from Paris Saint-Germain. Marseille are still only three points behind, and then Monaco are looking to close the gap to seven points by winning their game in hand against Montpellier. You do still feel that if PSG can put a run of wins together they will pull away from the rest, however. Their squad is so much better than the rest.
But now look at the Championship! Just look how tight it is!
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It is often said that the Championship is the hardest league in the world. It is notoriously difficult to play your own passing game with physical defenders hassling and harrying, and every team can beat any other team on a given day. Reputations tend to count for nothing.
But it is never usually this tight! The top seven teams are separated by only five points. Literally any one of them could win the league if they put a run together. Any two could gain automatic promotion, and at one of those teams will be very disappointed come May as they will have missed out on a play-off spot too.
The Championship is a second division, though. A ‘lower league’. So of course the standard of football is going to be lower in this league than in the top European leagues. And it isn’t just full of former Premier League clubs and ‘sleeping giants’, there are also teams like Rotherham (not to mention Bournemouth and Brentford, who are part of that group of teams challenging for the title!) who are more used to divisions lower than the second tier.
This is reflected in the average attendances. The average attendance across the whole league is just 14,808. Now this isn’t staggeringly low. Most Championship grounds hold fewer fans than Premier League grounds for example, and some are quite low capacity. But there are some grounds only half full some weeks.
This makes sense at clubs like Blackburn and Leeds, big clubs with a Premier League set-up who have been languishing below the big time and show no signs of coming back up.
But a more worrying reason for this is the ticket prices.
We hear every year that it costs less to watch Bayern Munich or Barcelona every week than it does to watch English teams. The average season ticket price in the Championship this season is £342.70. This is actually down from previous seasons
But it still only costs £104 to buy a season ticket to see Bayern Munich.
As quoted in the Daily Mail, Uli Hoeness said in May 2013: “We could charge more than £104. Let’s say we charged £300. We’d get £2m more in income but what’s £2m to us? In a transfer discussion you argue about that sum for five minutes.”
This isn’t true for Championship clubs, of course, but the fact that watching Robben, Muller and co. each week is so much cheaper than watching Championship games is food for thought. Admittedly, though, this does sound a little strange coming from Hoeness given that he was sentenced to three years in prison last year for tax fraud. He doesn’t exactly look like a true ‘man of the people’ just now. But he said back then was right.
But England has a league that is unrivalled in Europe for passion and excitement. Surely this has to be one of the metrics of how we measure the best league in the world? And surely it makes sense to advertise this by lowering ticket prices, putting it on TV more and showing the world why the Championship really is one of the top leagues in the world.
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