Chinese league appears to beginning to compete for Foreign Players

[TheKottonmouthed1555362307]

Yeah, the Russian league has leveled off a bit, but they have leveled off exactly where they want to be, and that's in striking distance of the top 5, which is still a big deal. climbing over the big five is a tough task, England, Spain, Italy, France and Germany have the upper hand on the rest of Europe in all aspects of the game, and always will

[Grizzly]

I agree, but I was just referring to the last 5 years only. The RPL definitely had a steady improvement in European results from 2000 to 2006.

This is not correct. Russia's European results were poor until the 2003-2004 season. They also had some good years in Europe in the late 90's, 97-98 and 98-99. Then there were 4 years that they really sucked in Europe from 99 to 2003. 2003-2004 was a decent year and then the breakthrough was 2004-2005, the year CSKA won the UEFA Cup. Since then the Europe results have been fairly consistent but they have managed to do this while having more teams in the competition in line with being higher ranked. Being able to maintain a spot with your points being divided by more teams including ones which are a few places from the top teams shows a league that has improving quality overall and not just getting fluke results over a year or two, ie. Romania. Also over the two years they have had 6 teams in the competition, the first year 3 were good and 3 were poor while last year 4 were good and 2 were poor.

While comparing Euro competition stats can be a good way to compare the top teams in a league, it really does not do much of a job in comparing the leagues themselves. Indeed having a competition of the lower and mid table teams in each league would be a far more accurate league comparison. Of course, the best way to compare leagues is to watch them. As someone who follows Russian soccer, I think the league has improved a lot over the last 5 years and at the same pace it was improving when it made a breakthrough in European competition. However as the Kottonmouthed stated, once you hit the number 6 spot and are in range of the really good leagues, it is hard for that improvement to really show in your rankings. The overall level of play in the league is continuing to go up though. I do think it is possible to reach the level of France or better because unlike France, Russia is able to keep most of its good players at home and is not as much of a feeder league to the big 4 as France is. However, they will have to be able to sign some bigger names at younger ages to do this. Getting to the level of the big 4 will be pretty hard and probably require many years of slow steady improvement. It will probably also require a general improvement in the standard of living in Russia, ie. higher priced tickets. Right now very little of the team budgets is derived from ticket sales especially outside Moscow and St. Petersburg because ticket prices need to be in line with Russian salaries so they are very low. The good teams are mostly funded on sponsorship money but to reach a certain level of play on a constant basis the teams will need to start generating more revenue and be less reliant on sponsors.