Not surprising

A colleague of mine is a big fan on the pace and speed of EPL. In many ways I am too, but I also am disappointed with the lack of outright creativity. Everything is so anticipated and usual. There is of course the special piece of skill once in a while from the top teams, but not enough in my opinion. On the other hand, La liga teams have sublime skill, its not all physical and that is so different from how most of EPL teams play. Each their own I guess...

But something that doesn't appeal to me from either facet of the game is the Serie A. The quality of football is going down the drain in Italy and it showed in the world cup. The games are played to half filled stadiums and that tells a story in itself. The teams I follow in Serie A are inter, ac milan and juventus and each of them are far below the standards by the other two big leagues i.e. EPL and La liga. There then should be no surprise that the teams that make it to europe and more specifically uefa champions league rarely make it past the knockout stage. And in this edition, ac milan has been taken to the cleaners at home by newbies tottenham while last years champions inter lost at home to bayern. The story is same in europa league where all the italian teams are out of contention with hardly any fight being put up.

These very obvious signs have not gone unnoticed and uefa has decided to reduce the number of teams from serie A getting automatic qualification to the champions league from 4 to 3. All this doesnt auger well for italian football and it wont be long before big players, even italians choose clubs outside of Italy to make their mark. The league making the most of the situation is Bundesliga which gets promoted to Serie A's place. And quite contrary to Italy, Germany was a revelation in the world cup. And after a long time you see german players playing outside of home with Mourinho reading the obvious. He has taken Ozil and Khedira, the stars of the world cup, and they are not doing too bad for themselves.Here is hoping to see more of these kind of german youngsters and their skills in the coming years in europe.

Overall this is the right move for football and will make the UEFA CL and Europa leagues more competitive in the coming year(s).