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For sport to be truly exciting, the single most important ingrediant is a degree of unpredictability. You want there to be various teams that are competitive and that all stand a chance of success. However, to achieve that in team sport, you need a more or less level playing field. That aspect has been plainly lacking in recent years in the English Premier League.

If we look at the English Premier League, it was founded in 1993 and, in the intervening period, has been won by only four teams. Between 1993 and 2009, Manchester United have won the Premier League 11 times, Arsenal have won it 3 times, Chelsea twice and Blackburn Rovers once. That Blackburn success was back in 1995 and in recent years it has become increasingly rare for the smaller teams to even finish in the top four. Indeed, it's now commonly agreed that there is a Big Four, comprised of Man Utd, Chelsea, Arsenal, and Liverpool, and it is deemed a shock if any other team even sneaks into the top four league placings.

The Football League, on the other hand, does not have dominant teams. By its very nature, if a team achieves success one year, they are then promoted to a higher league, thereby finding themselves up against better teams. Combined with this, there is also fierce competitiveness to try to make it up through the leagues to win a place at football's top table, the money-making machine that is the Premier League.

I'm sure many Premier League fans would counter my argument that the Football League has more to offer by pointing out that the best players play in the Premier League and that the quality of football is therefore better. There's no denying that. The Premier League does contain superstars, such as Rooney, Gerard, Fabregas and Lampard but sporting spectacles are often based on the ferocity of the competition and the suspense of not knowing who is going to win. The Football League wins hands down on that count and it is something that the Premier League may, in due course, have to confront. It's not just the fact that we already know which teams will compete for next season's Premier League title. The more damning fact is that we also have a pretty good idea of which teams will finish between 5th and 14th, and which teams will be involved in a dog fight to avoid relegation.

This is a far cry from the Seventies and Eighties, when teams such as Derby, Nottingham Forest and Aston Villa won England's top division, and when teams such as Ipswich, Southampton, and West Ham challenged

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