Jamie Carragher has questioned the Premier League’s quality in the wake of Chelsea’s Champions League elimination.
The former Liverpool defender, who is now a pundit for the Premier League’s biggest cheerleader, Sky Sports, believes top flight English teams are in danger of losing their identity and hit out at a scattergun transfer policy which is inhibiting European progress.
Chelsea’s exit in the last 16 to Paris Saint-Germain on Wednesday night offered up the distinct possibility of England having no representative in the quarter-finals of the Champions League. Arsenal travel to Monaco on Tuesday, after a 3-1 first leg defeat, while the Premier League champions, Manchester City, have it all to do at the Camp Nou following their 2-1 loss at the Etihad Stadium. Liverpool have already tumbled out of Europe in both formats while Everton remain the only British team in the much-maligned Europa League.
Rather than seeing the European failure as a blip, Carragher is concerned about the long-term thinking within Premier League clubs.
“I only felt there was one English team with a chance of winning the Champions League before the start of the season and that was Chelsea,” said Carragher. “You seen how far they looked off PSG. I know they never lost either game but both games PSG were far superior and they are not what you would call one of the absolute elite, well you wouldn’t have said it before the tie you would have felt Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, Barcelona …
“So for Chelsea, our best team in the league, to go out to a PSG side that what you would call before the tie not one of the top sides is disappointing. As a whole, the rest of the league, we are falling short in things that we used to do to the other teams.
“At Liverpool [when Carragher played in the Champions League] we had great technical players at the time, but we were more powerful than the other teams. We had the physical intensity of the Premier League, we took that into the Champions League. Now you look at it and PSG looked more powerful than Chelsea over the two games which is probably a bigger worry more than the football.”
Pundits and managers continue to hold up the Premier League as the best in the world but, following the disastrous European performances this season, Carragher argues that overall quality within the top flight has fallen.
“I think it has [deteriorated],” he added. “I think it has the last few years. With the new TV deal, the clubs get a lot of money. But I think that maybe because they have so much money that when you’re buying players in it doesn’t mean enough to bring a player in because you have that much money. You can bring a player in but if it doesn’t quite work out you still have the money to bring another in.
“We should actually be dominating European football I think, considering the financial aspect of the Premier League. I still think it is the most exciting league, that is why it generates the funds it does. In terms of quality, I don’t know if our clubs are getting kidded when they buy players from abroad, because the players we are bringing in and the prices we are playing. You look at some of those players involved [against Chelsea] and what we see in the Champions League. We were probably all watching Monaco [last week] and probably only knew two or three of their players, but they had some really good players in there who showed Arsenal up. It is something we have to look at in the summer and the years after when the new TV deal money comes in and we have to be spending it more wisely.”
Carragher was helping to promote a charity match at Anfield later this month in which he will manage a side against one managed by Steven Gerrard, in a game for which Luis Suárez also returns to Merseyside.
But Carragher is concerned that the ever-increasing television deals, which flood money into Premier League clubs, could eventually wash away the next generation of English talent.
He said: “You could argue there are too many foreign players but not top foreign players. The top Champions League teams have the top foreign players, and they go to those clubs. There is no doubt the top English players 10 years ago were making a massive impact in the Champions league and I don’t think they our English players are now. I just think we are not quite getting the best players coming here. You can talk about the English players and that is sort of a different debate, a different argument. The impact on the Champions League was a lot greater from those players, you think of John Terry, Rio Ferdinand, Frank [Lampard], Stevie, and their impact was huge.”