There seems to be a general consensus that the top Premier League teams are as bad as they've been for quite some time. Defending champions Chelsea appear to have become disillusioned with the Mourinho mentality; Manchester City's excellent attack is undermined by a dodgy defense; their near neighbors United are shackled by Louis van Gaal's sterile possession; and Arsenal, are ... well, they're Arsenal.
How TV money created the strongest Premier League mid-table ever
The Premier League’s remarkable TV deal has helped narrow the gap between the best and the rest.
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But West Ham boss Slaven Bilić has taken to looking at the domestic woes of England’s top sides from a different (and admittedly a slightly more self-serving) perspective. It’s not necessarily that they’re getting worse, but being made to look so by the improvement of sides that would have previously been expected to roll over and gift three points to the title chasers -- aided by the Premier League’s well-publicized new television deal worth in excess of £5 billion ($7.75 billion USD).
"The kind of financial support in this league gives smaller clubs the possibility to bring extra players -- like Georginio Wijnaldum at Newcastle and West Brom have got Salomón Rondón," the Daily Star has quoted Bilić as saying. "Rondon is a top striker and there are many Rondóns in the Premier League now. Yohan Cabaye at Crystal Palace and Xherdan Shaqiri at Stoke who was before at Inter Milan -- one of the biggest clubs in the world. So now you have all those great players in let's say smaller clubs and of course the gap is smaller."
A quick look at the statistics and it becomes impossible to refute Bilić's claim. This summer, according to Transfermarkt, individual record fees were broken by Bournemouth (Tyrone Mings), Crystal Palace (Yohan Cabaye), Leicester City (Shinji Okazaki), Southampton (Virgil van Dijk), Stoke City (Xherdan Shaqiri), Watford (Étienne Capoue) and West Brom (Salomón Rondón). That in itself is interesting but not totally surprising: Steady inflation as the game grows richer makes ever-higher transfer fees an inevitability.
But rather more telling is the standard of player being attracted to the Premier League. Those who would have previously opted to join bigger clubs in lesser leagues are suddenly finding themselves attracted to England’s mid-table. Cabaye was willing to swap a rotation role at Paris-Saint Germain for the promise of a regular slot in the Crystal Palace midfield; Shaqiri was willing to swap Inter Milan for the glamour of the Potteries; and Dimitri Payet left the French Riviera for the river Thames, despite Marseille’s impressive Ligue 1 campaign under Marcelo Bielsa.
Meanwhile, newly promoted Watford are an exception proving the rule. They’re owned by the Pozzo family, who also control Udinese in Italy and Granada in Spain, and so frequently shift players between clubs depending on their interests and requirements at particular moments. Whereas a few years ago Udinese were competing for a spot in the Champions League and were quite clearly the Pozzo’s top priority, their focus has seemingly switched to the vastly more lucrative Premier League: Most notably top scorer Odion Ighalo has played at both of the other clubs in their network before being parachuted into Vicarage Road.
Those who would have previously opted to join bigger clubs in lesser leagues are suddenly finding themselves attracted to England's mid-table
On the flip side, it's surely no coincidence that the clubs that have refused to match the increase in average spend, Newcastle United, Sunderland and Aston Villa, are the three well-established top-flight teams finding themselves in an almighty struggle at the bottom of the table. It's partly because they're paying the price for poor business in seasons past: As of last year, Newcastle had the seventh-highest wage bill in the entire division, Sunderland the ninth and Villa the 10th; as a result, they're finding it impossible to sell off their very expensive deadwood and bring in players of an adequate standard. While everyone else in the Premier League's mid-table is improving, they're flying backwards.
Of course, big clubs are spending as well as the middling ones: Just this summer Manchester City twice broke their own transfer record to sign Raheem Sterling and then Kevin De Bruyne; while as part of a big spending spree at cross-town rivals United, Louis van Gaal spent an eye-watering £35 million on unproven teenager Anthony Martial.
But it’s much harder for the very best clubs to improve: There are few players on the planet who could individually enhance the constituent parts of England’s top four, and even fewer that are readily available. The result is that the quality of the top four is static, relative to the big leaps that can fairly easily be taken by the Premier League’s rest. The point is not that the gap is ever going to close, but that it is narrower than it has been for over a decade. For the league as a spectacle, that can only be a good thing.
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