10 Reasons Why the EPL Is the Best League in World Football
There are many many football leagues around the world that offer up some amazing spectacles to watch week in and week out. However, some leagues have more appeal than others.
This article is not meant to knock anyone's favorite league, but it is meant to offer up a personal view of reasoning for why the English Premier League is heads and shoulders above many others around the globe at the moment.
10. History
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England is the birthplace of the modern game. The first official match being recorded as having occurred in 1863.
The encyclopedia of English Football states that the first mentioning of the game that would become football as recorded in 1170 in a journal entry of William FitzStephen.
How fitting is it that the country that created the game also has developed the best overall domestic league system in the world.
9. The Stadiums
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The English Premier League is home to some of the most storied grounds in footballing history. From the Shankly Gates of Liverpool's Anfield Road to the remembrance of Arsenal's fabled Highbury, it is another part of the league that reminds everyone that they just don't make them like they used to.
The street named grounds of old are slowly being replaced by corporate sponsored stadiums a new, but there are still many legendary ones in use such as Tottenham Hotspur's White Heart Lane and Manchester United's Old Trafford.
8. Attendance
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The English Premier League is the perennial highest attended Association Football League. This season saw an unofficial total of 13,372,787 fans watch 380 games with an average attendance of over 35,000 per game.
The Second Division in England is another high attendance league at just under 10,000,000, and they outrank the top divisions of Italy and France.
Germany's Bundesliga was only a few hundred thousand behind the EPL in unofficial total attendance at 13,106,018 and are the only league to top the EPL in average attendance per game at 42,690.
7. Player Quality
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England's EPL has the highest number of players ranked in the top 100 of the UEFA Castrol Rankings. With 34 out of the top 100 players, they have five more ranked players than Spain's La Liga with 29.
Moreover, the English League boasts a better distribution of top ranked players in the first 100 as they are spread out across 11 teams, where as Spain's top players only represent seven teams.
6. Competition
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The competition between the teams in the EPL is also almost unmatched across the board. It's a league where every team is strong and any given weekend could see multiple upsets or multiple poundings being distributed from the top team in the league to the bottom of the barrel at No. 20.
Overall points averages for the EPL are also very high as the average number of points per team is at 51. The spread between first and last was only 47 this season, and only the Bundesliga was closer at 46, however the Germany League operates with only 18 teams compared to the EPL using 20 which means the ratio would most likely not be the same if the amount of teams were equal this season.
5. Fans and Atmosphere
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English Premier League fans are amongst the best in the world and are known for their creation of electric atmospheres all throughout the league fixtures and even more so when it comes to a midweek European night.
4. Spectacular Action
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The English Premier League creates some of the best highlight real action on the pitch. Whether it is a bone jarring tackle or a bicycle kick goal for glory, there is never a shortage of great pace, passion and action in the English League.
3. The FA Cup
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Only the oldest association footballing competition in the world, England's FA Cup pits every single team in the country that meets the FA's guidelines for entry to the test, including the big clubs from the EPL. Participation in the world's oldest tournament does little to harm the status of your league.
The majority of the time it is a team from the top flight that claims the oldest revered trophy in the world, but sometimes a lower division team can wrestle it from the upper division's grasp.
2. The Derbies
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England is home to some of the best rivalry matches in the world. Be it be a showdown between cross town rivals like Spurs and Arsenal, or a matchup of heavyweight historical proportions with Manchester United and Liverpool, nearly every weekend sees a rivalry match get taken to the bitter end.
1. Worldwide Exposure
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There truly is no doubt that the English Premier League is truly the most accessible league on the planet, and that has led to man many more fans pushing the English game to the top of the need to watch list.
The global pull of the league also is boosted by the number of teams that have high global profiles. Liverpool, Arsenal, Manchester United, Chelsea, Manchester City, Tottenham, Newcastle United; all these teams have massive curb appeal to the average fan, where as the majority of other leagues don't have quite as many teams that have that kind of fan base of pull.
