The PL got sick of all the other leagues talking smack about it. These things always go in cycles. We have had more PL teams in the latter stages of the CL than any other league for years yet as soon as we don't have someone in the final everyone is gushing about the German and Spanish leagues and saying the PL is rubbish.
Its a different style of league and unless we suddenly get the climate and culture of places like Milan, Barcelona, Madrid etc we won't always be at the top of every star players list of places to visit.
Chelsea have won the CL and EL over the last 2 years so I think criticising English football is just the trendy thing to do at the moment.
The champs league isn't why people are talking about the EPL being crap, although the quality of Chelsea's football throughout the competitions does suggest so, they won playing their "lets sit deep and pray really really really really really hard". Bayern went out there and dominated Barca, who themselves usually go out and dominate other teams, they all played great football. Utd, Arsenal, City haven't either, not for 3-4 years. Utd are being spanked into the Europa league or going out with poor performances, City were a complete joke, Arsenal looked poor and got spanked by Bayern/Milan.
But its watching the actual premier league where you can VERY easily see how crap its getting, and star players not wanting to stay here, I've said that for years, but there are always replacements. One of the reasons for the overall leagues decline is poorly buying foreign players, sticking with guys like Valencia when Utd can afford to bring in a top notch player instead. But ultimately the Spanish league relies incredibly heavily on Spanish players, the German league relies on german players.... the english league still has a huge contingent of English players, and the gulf in quality between them and the rest is, well, insurmountable.
English players seem to have gone backwards, while Spanish/German and generally european trained players have improved.
Seriously Cleverley, AOC, Welbeck are seen as the best of the new generation of English players.......... welbeck, lol. Germany gets Muller, Gotze and 20 others who are so far ahead of the new English crop of players it is nothing short of embarrassing.
THe homegrown rules and forcing teams like Utd to not only hang on to guys like Welbeck, but end up giving him 85k a week because they have to keep English guys in the team, for City to be spending over 20mil on Milner, more than £4 on Barry, we just gave Walcott 100k a week to stay.
Worst thing the EPL did was introduce the homegrown rules, it instantly gave english players better bargaining power, and meant all of the league paying english players more than they are worth which meant less cash for paying foreign players to ignore living in nicer places with nicer weather to live in places like Manchester.
The prem league has been dropping off in quality massively for 4-5 years, and the champions league has smeg all to do with proof. You can just watch the league, its less entertaining, with worse quality players, with less skill and more teams fighting to be the worst rather than the best.
