In January this year, as English football obsessed over winter moves for the likes of Wilfried Bony and Juan Cuadrado, Raul Albentosa swapped Eibar for Derby County in a move that barely registered on England’s transfer radar.

In Spain, however, the reaction was very different. 

“Albentosa worth his weight…in pounds,” said a startled Marca in the Spanish capital, summing up the feeling of the country’s footballing community. Here was an Eibar first-team regular swapping La Liga for the Championship, England’s second tier financially outmuscling Spain’s first. It wasn’t even the Premier League doing the damage.

Imagine, then, what the Premier League could do to La Liga. Or to the Bundesliga. Or to Serie A or Ligue 1. Or to the Eredivisie, Primeira Liga, the Super Lig or the Russian Premier League. Well, you actually don’t need to imagine it; the reality is already evident.

When the Premier League announced its colossal, £5.136 billion TV rights deal in February, the league’s chief executive, Richard Scudamore, admitted he was “surprised” by the sheer weight of cash coming the Premier League’s way. “Burnley are now, economically, bigger than Ajax,” he said. And he wasn’t wrong: This summer, Burnley, even after relegation, have spent £14.46 million in the transfer market; Ajax have spent £7.91 million, per Transfermarkt.

If you look around, you’ll find the Clarets aren’t the only English outfit overwhelming decorated European clubs. 

This summer, Newcastle United, who fought relegation last season, have taken the 14-goal Georginio Wijnaldum from PSV Eindhoven, as well as Aleksandar Mitrovic and Chancel Mbemba from Anderlecht and Florian Thauvin from Marseille, all three selling clubs title contenders in the Netherlands, Belgium and France respectively. Newcastle’s neighbours, Sunderland, have also gotten in on the act, signing Jeremain Lens from Ukrainian champions Dynamo Kyiv.

Elsewhere, another of last season’s relegation-threatened outfits, Aston Villa, recently outbid Ligue 1 runners-up Lyon for Nice’s Jordan Amavi, the Frenchman joining Idrissa Gueye in Birmingham after the latter’s switch from Lille—the 2010-11 French champions. Fellow Midlands outfit West Bromwich Albion lured Jose Salomon Rondon to the Premier League, the Venezuelan fresh from scoring 13 goals in Zenit Saint Petersburg’s title-winning season in Russia.

Those four clubs aren’t alone, either; nearly every club from the Premier League’s middle and lower classes is doing the same.

Southampton have signed Jordy Clasie from Feyenoord; Swansea City have pinched Andre Ayew from Marseille; Stoke City pulled off a heist by getting Xherdan Shaqiri from Inter Milan; Crystal Palace went shopping at Paris Saint-Germain to get Yohan Cabaye; West Ham United bought Dimitri Payet from Marseille and Angelo Ogbonna from Juventus; Leicester City took Gokhan Inler from Napoli and Christian Fuchs from Schalke; Bournemouth signed Max Gradel from Saint-Etienne; Watford got Jose Manuel Jurado from Spartak Moscow. 

Evidently, the Premier League’s financial might means its clubs are gobbling up most of Europe. 

This is now a world in which, according to Deloitte’s Football Money League, West Ham and Aston Villa have bigger budgets than Italian heavyweights AS Roma and Sunderland’s annual revenue is almost on par with that of 2014 Spanish champions Atletico Madrid. 

And this before the £5.136 billion of TV money even arrives, the new deal coming into effect next season. So if England’s lesser lights are enjoying the feeding frenzy, what does it mean for the country’s elite, the Manchester Uniteds, Manchester Citys, Arsenals, Chelseas and Liverpools of this world?

Ironically, little more than a month after the Premier League announced its landscape-altering deal with Sky and BT Sport, Manchester City, Chelsea and Arsenal were dumped out of the Champions League, the world’s richest competition left without a representative in Europe’s final eight.

At the same time, LFP president Javier Tebas (Spain’s equivalent of Scudamore), like most football administrators around Europe, was frantically looking for an answer for La Liga, for a way his league could compete. Doing so was “urgentisimo,” he told Sid Lowe of ESPN FC. 

Yet despite La Liga’s financial inferiority to the Premier League, Spain’s top division had three representatives in the Champions League’s final eight in Barcelona, Real Madrid and Atletico Madrid. Admittedly, the hegemony of Barca and Real contributes significantly to the vast financial inequalities in Spain, but Atletico continue to punch above their weight in Europe, and this season they’ll be joined in the continent’s top tier by Valencia and Sevilla—excellent sides entirely capable of toppling England’s elite.

So the question then becomes: Shouldn’t the Premier League’s cash be addressing this shortcoming? The obvious should be yes, but in reality, it might actually be no. 

The transfer market activity witnessed in England this summer has neatly outlined the problem the Premier League’s elite face. Below them, the division’s bottom 14 clubs are spending like they never have before, shopping in places they’ve only previously dreamed about. Think about it: Relegation-threatened clubs in the Premier League are signing leading players from title contenders in Europe. 

Consequently, the top-to-bottom standard of the league is being driven north, the gulf between the respective ends of the table narrowing. Already this season we’ve seen that Swansea, West Ham and Crystal Palace will be a real handful, that the newly promoted sides won’t at all be pushovers, that the race to be best of the rest will be absolutely ferocious.

After three games, only one team has a perfect record in the Premier League, only five out of 20 have won more than once, and out of 30 completed games, there have only been six home wins. Six.

It’s not unreasonable to suggest, then, that it’s never been harder to win a Premier League game than it is right now. Every outing is a battle, a scrap, time and comfort rarely available to experiment or slip down a gear.

For the league in isolation, it’s magnificent; every game has the potential to be an enthralling contest. But for the league’s elite, it’s hardly beneficial for their aspirations in Europe, the energy and preparation time needed for Champions League ties denied to them by the demands of their own domestic competition.

But the issue could also go beyond the way the division’s “have-nots” are closing in on being “haves”. Indeed, even with the cash influx, the Premier League’s heavyweights are still struggling to close the gap on the likes of Barcelona, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich because they already appear to be shopping in the highest player bracket they can. The league’s financial muscle doesn’t appear to be changing that. 

This summer, Chelsea’s biggest signing to date is Pedro Rodriguez, Arsenal’s is Petr Cech, Manchester United’s is Memphis Depay, Manchester City’s is Raheem Sterling and Liverpool’s is Christian Benteke. Do those men improve their respective squads? In most cases, yes. But are they the difference between the Champions League round of 16 and the competition’s final? Probably not.

Last summer, it was similar. The Premier League’s headline arrivals were Diego Costa, Cesc Fabregas, Alexis Sanchez, Angel Di Maria, Ander Herrera and Eliaquim Mangala—players either discarded by Barcelona and Real Madrid or players who wouldn’t get into their first XIs. And despite Arsenal’s ability to fork out £42.5 million on him, Mesut Ozil fell into the same group the summer before, his services not needed at the Bernabeu.

Thus, what we appear to have in the Premier League is a situation in which the division’s elite, despite their wealth, are shopping in group, say, “1b.” But to close the gap on Barca, Real and Bayern, that’s not enough: They need to be shopping in “1a.” But can they?

Late last year, the Guardian, using a panel of 73 experts, provided its ranking of the top 100 players in world football. Of the top 50, only 14 at the time played in the Premier League, and only 12 still do. Among the top 10, just one does.

Even with its extraordinarily deep pockets, England can’t keep or sign the creme de la creme: Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Luis Suarez, Neymar, James Rodriguez, Gareth Bale, Thomas Muller, Arjen Robben, Toni Kroos, Philipp Lahm or Manuel Neuer. Those 11 men were in the Guardian‘s top 15 but none of them play in the Premier League. And not far behind them in the rankings were Andres Iniesta, Sergio Ramos, Luka Modric, Karim Benzema, Robert Lewandowski, Mario Gotze, Xabi Alonso, Arturo Vidal and Javier Mascherano, among others.

Not surprisingly, it’s Barcelona, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich who are the last three European champions, the Premier League’s elite watching their domestic competitors below them get stronger and stronger, concurrently finding themselves unable to take the next step to catch the world’s leading trio.

To make the jump from very good to great, England’s top clubs need the sort of players who simply aren’t available to them at present.

But could all of this be cyclical? After all, as recently as 2008, the Premier League had three of the four Champions League semi-finalists. Could it swing back that way again?

It’s certainly possible, but there are trends that suggest the current dominance of Barca, Real and Bayern on the European stage may be here to stay for the short term at least. Potentially longer. 

One of the major issues seemingly facing the Premier League is that it can’t match the allure of the aforementioned triumvirate for the world’s hottest talent beds.

The last two World Cup winners are Spain and Germany, demonstrating the countries’ current superiority in developing the finest the continent has to offer. Additionally, Spain and Germany have also dominated European football at youth level in recent years, sharing three of the last four under-21 titles, four of the last five under-19 crowns and having appearing in four of the last six European finals at under-17 level—they split the three titles before that too.

For reference, when English clubs last stood at the forefront of the European game, the talent pools were more diverse, as the history of the European Under-21 Championship illustrates. Finalists in the tournament between 2000 and 2007 included the Netherlands, Serbia, Serbia and Montenegro, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, France and Italy, an almost decade-long wave of talent coming through Europe with little sense of attachment to La Liga’s giants or Bayern. 

But it’s now very different. Not only do Barcelona and Real Madrid represent the undisputed pinnacle in the minds of most, but they also hold a social significance and identity that resonates with the players populating one of the continent’s two hottest talent beds. For the other, Bayern Munich is exactly the same. Players from those nations will rarely, if ever, turn down those clubs, their pulling power unmatched for where the largest crops of stars are emerging from.

The fact Bastian Schweinsteiger is the first German to ever play for the Manchester United first team demonstrates the effect of that allure, a nation that is a footballing powerhouse having remained essentially untouched by the Premier League’s biggest of all.

What’s more, in the case of Real Madrid and Barcelona, the talent hotbeds in South America and elsewhere on the Iberian Peninsula are further resources that are easily tapped into. With the similarities in culture, language and climate, moving to one of La Liga’s big two is both attractive and natural for the finest players hailing from Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Chile and Portugal—five countries that currently reside high up FIFA’s world rankings along with Spain and Germany.

As such, this is the problem for the Premier League’s elite. Around them, their own league is growing stronger, the depth increasing, the collective spectacle from top to bottom becoming greater. The division’s middle and lower classes are benefiting immensely from the cash influx, possibly closing the gap in front of them. But the heavy hitters themselves can’t seem to take steps of a similar extent, unable to close the gap they want to close—the one to Barca, Real and Bayern.

Right now, the very finest, group “1a,” the creme de la creme, continue to elude them. And while the talent hotbeds, the next generation of stars, continue to have a nationalistic connection and association in identity to places such as the Spanish capital, Catalonia and Bavaria, it’s possible that even the immense cash influx coming to the Premier League in the very near future won’t immediately change that.

  

Follow @TimDCollins

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