Don’t mistake a three-way title race for a competitive Premier League

A fter Arsenal’s dramatic 4-2 victory at Villa Park on Saturday, Jorginho was effusive in his praise of the English top flight. “That’s the Premier League,” he said. “That’s why it’s the best league in the world. It’s beautiful.” The Italy midfielder is not the first player or pundit to make such a claim and he will not be the last. The Premier League sells this narrative to its ever-increasing global audience and it is, by some margin, the world’s richest league, with revenues for its 20 clubs expected to exceed £6 billion this season – as much as their two nearest rivals, La Liga and the Bundesliga, combined.

The Premier League prides itself on being the most competitive of the leading European leagues. The story goes that, on any given day, a team towards the bottom of the table can beat a team near the top. This David and Goliath narrative is undoubtedly attractive to broadcasters, introducing a sense of jeopardy to the continuous diet of televised matches. However, the evidence of the last decade shows that the strong are getting stronger, and the gap between them and the weak is getting much, much wider.

Increasingly, the league has been dominated by whichever teams finish first and second, with the Manchester clubs and Liverpool taking those top two spots over the last five seasons. Of course, other leading European leagues have a similar hegemony at the top – and are often dominated by just one club. Bayern Munich are on a run of 10 successive Bundesliga titles; Juventus won nine straight Serie A titles between 2012 and 2020; PSG have finished top in eight of the last 10 seasons in France; and only three clubs – Barcelona, Real Madrid and Atlético Madrid – have won La Liga in the last 18 years.

This season