England's Champions League Dominance: Bad For The Premiership?

Listening to a popular UK football phone-in on the radio, a caller made a very interesting point on the Premiership's dominance in the last four years of Europe's elite competition, the Champions League.

To quote, he stated that the English game is "at risk of killing the goose that laid the golden egg."

Being a top-four fan, this type of thinking had not previously crossed my mind. Will the continued overpowering of European teams by English teams be to the detriment of the English game?

Having thought about it, the answer is that the risk is significant. As the caller so astutely put, sport is centred around competition, making it necessary to maintain as close a competition as possible. Since 2005, this particular competition has most definitely been centred around the English teams.

In 2005, there were two English semi-finalists and an English winner: 2006 saw an English finalist. In '07, however, there were three English semi-finalists and yet another English team losing at the final hurdle. 2008 saw the pinnacle of this sequence so far, with three semi-finalists and an all-English final. But surely this can only be good for the English game?

In short, not necessarily.

If, as mentioned, the competition and therefore the sport ceases to be competitive, the fans will stop watching and the money will slowly flow away from the game. With the Premiership at the epicentre of the cash flowing around football, this is a genuine possibility.

European audiences must surely be getting bored of the growing control the English teams have on the latter stages of the competition and, with the fourth-placed team in England knocking out the champions of major football nations, who can blame them?

With the champions of smaller leagues still having to go through qualifying rounds, the Champions League doesn't look like having many genuine challengers aside from those that we could predict two seasons beforehand.

As many point out, the money that has been thrown around in the last 20 years is slowly sucking the competition out of the sport.

If the Champions League becomes a procession and fans end up switching off or switching to more competitive sports, the money from Europe could dwindle and qualification could mean less money for the clubs, lowering the standard of players in the league.

Money has changed football permanently; this debate has never emerged before as it was never an issue before. Hopefully, as we have seen before, this particular national control will be superseded eventually and the competition that makes the sport great will eventually return.

Should we attempt to curb the dominance of English sides or is this just a phase, similar to the Italian successes of the mid-nineties? If a change is needed, what should be done? Please comment below.

Follow Jon's Sport Rumours on Twitter