QUOTE (Jack Bauer @ Dec 17 2012, 11:13 PM)

I don't think other teams are too bad, and you can see that they are doing well in europe recently, it's just the gap between therm and top2 is just too big and the league is not doing anything to close it, on the contrary.
Yeah, EPL is number 1 without doubt.
Still Valencia, Athletico, and whoever the flavour of the season is. They're all teetering on the edge most of the time, and they usually sell off their best players either to Barca and Madrid or the EPL sides. They do well in Europe because of the Europa League. Sort of like what the German teams do as well, which is how they took that 4th spot off Italy.
Italy imo, have stronger teams then La Liga outside of the top 2 of course. But their problem has always been that they didn't give a sh!t about the UEFA Cup and still barely do about the EL. I remember a case, I think it was 05 or something close to that. And this was the year at Italy's peak imo before the steady decline began.
Donadoni was coaching Livorno at the time and because he sent out a strong side in the UEFA Cup game the pesident went into a rant about it. Teams in Italy have always done this, and I expect to see the same thing from Napoli, Lazio and Inter when we're at the business end of the season because making the CL next year is more important than having a good run in the 2nd rate competition. And this backwards thinking is what got Italy in this mess. The fact is that Italian teams have done as well as the Spanish sides in these last 10 years if I'm not mistaken in terms of CL wins. 2 for us and 1 for Inter while Barca got all 3 for Spain. German teams have not won it once during this time. Yet they have more representation in the competition because they did better in UEFA Cup/EL