jones wrote:
You start off with leaving any subjectivity aside and start with an arbitrary starting point of ten years and an arbitrary factor of competitiveness by focusing on the amount of different winners. Bar 18/19 every title race since 2015 was more or less over by February/March, Bayern or Juventus for example have been pushed to the brink a lot more than your Citys Chelseas or Liverpool last year.
What's wrong with using a 10 year timescale? We're trying to discuss the leagues as they stand today so, if anything, I'm being quite generous going that far back considering if I cut it off at 8 years, there would only be 1 team winning the league.
As for the points gap between winners and the runner up:
Premier League: 15/16 - 10 points 16/17 - 7 points 17/18 - 19 points 18/19 - 1 point 19/20 - 18 points
Bundesliga: 15/16 - 10 points 16/17 - 15 points 17/18 - 21 points 18/19 - 2 point 19/20 - 13 points
If I had to justify why I picked a 5 year timescale, it's because that's the period of Liverpool and City domination. And also because I couldn't be bothered to check beyond that.
Technically there's been a wider gap between the winning team and the runners up in 3 out of the past 5 seasons in Germany. However that wouldn't be fair. Overall, there's not that much difference in the points needed to win the league. However in that time, 4 different clubs have won the Premier League. Only 1 club has won the Bundesliga.
Those figures you quote are conveniently leaving out 15/16 where English teams shat the bed while Spanish teams won CL and EL, while including the current season where only qualifiers have been played. If you include the last full five seasons the gaps look a lot closer to what I said. Regardless, I wasn't talking about the coefficient figures in the first place, they use highly dodgy weighting ie EL matches won being worth as much as CL wins and they're also largely irrelevant due to the rule changes from a couple seasons ago.
So, to be clear, your accusing me of being arbitrary but you're narrowing in on one particular season in 2015-2016 and ignoring every season since? Regardless, Premier League clubs have done better than Bundesliga clubs in both competitions.
I was talking exclusively about the quality of both leagues and as someone who watches both most Match days while I'd say the EPL is better there's certainly no chasm between them. Claudes original point of the lower level of competition was with regards to both leagues in their entirety, if I respond naming teams from said leagues instead of focusing just on the teams you're in a position to 'meaningfully compare' because you don't watch both leagues then frankly you're not only in no position to accuse me of putting up strawmen you're not really adding anything to the discussion.
You're responding by picking up specific names and excluding others. For every Fulham, there's a Leicester, for every West Brom, there's a Wolves. Making any coherent argument would require you to acknowledge that fact and without it I just think you're biased being your local team plays in the Bundesliga. I'll take your word that the quality of football at the bottom of the Bundesliga is high because that's all there is to go on since you haven't actually offered any evidence. I feel fairly sure that isn't the case for the top 7 teams though.
