May 8th, 2008

9:38am Thursday 8th May 2008

WHATEVER his motives, Kevin Keegan pretty much hit the nail on the head when he claimed the widening gulf between the Big Four' and the rest was making the Premier League boring.

True, we are going into the final weekend with the title, a UEFA Cup spot and two of the three relegation places up for grabs, but a sense of genuine competition within the topflight disappeared a long time ago.

The Premier League is now comprised of three distinct and separate mini-leagues: the top four who compete for the title, the bottom six or seven who fight to stave off the threat of relegation, and the rest who scrap it out for a European spot and desperately hope for a decent run in one of the cup competitions.

Movement between the minileagues is minimal and, in the case of progression from the middle strata to the top one, all but impossible. Teams will occasionally flit between the bottom two sections - Reading and Middlesbrough for example - but, on the whole, the make-up of the mini-leagues is pretty much set in stone before a ball is even kicked.

Therefore, success' for a club like Newcastle means a fifth-placed finish and an appearance in the FA Cup final.

Middlesbrough's performance between 2004 and 2006, when they finished seventh in the Premier League and reached a UEFA Cup final and an FA Cup semi-final, is about as good as it is ever going to get at the Riverside. And if Sunderland were to establish themselves as a mid-table side next season, the only direction available to them over the following three or four years would be down. And all this in a hotbed of English football.

The situation has been created by a number of related factors, but by far the most important is the existence of the Champions League. The financial disparity between the Champions League haves' and the Premier League have nots' is astronomical and, tellingly, is also becoming evident in countries that retained their competitive edge slightly longer than England.

Lyon are about to win their seventh successive title in France, Inter Milan are about to claim their third successive Serie A crown in Italy and the days when a Valencia or a Deportivo could break the Barcelona-Real duopoly in Spain are long gone. Scour all of Europe's major leagues, and you will discover that it is not just the Premier League that is boring.

So one way to break the current monotony would be to scrap the Champions League and reintroduce an old-style European Cup containing one side from every country. The problem, of course, being that it is not going to happen. Turkeys do not vote for Christmas, and Europe's leading clubs are not going to limit their moneymaking potential.

The same applies to salary caps: nice idea in theory, never going to happen in practice.

They would have to be worldwide for a start, otherwise the best players would simply migrate to where the money is greatest, thereby reducing the marketability and appeal of the Premier League, and they are unlikely to be legally enforceable in an environment where freedom of trade, movement and competition is guaranteed.

One legal challenge from an aggrieved employee, and the salary cap system would collapse like a pack of cards.

So what are we left with?

Well, a secondary strand of Keegan's argument on Monday provides a clue. "You have to be honest and say you're not going to get the best players,"

said the Newcastle boss.

"Chelsea had Andriy Shevchenko and Frank Lampard on the bench, and Ashley Cole didn't even get stripped."

The Big Four' clubs currently stockpile the best talent, even if they're unable to use it on a week-to-week basis. Stopping this practice would help to increase competition, so Premier League clubs should be restricted to a maximum squad size of 18 players. Emergency loans could supplement this figure if a club was to prove that injuries and suspensions genuinely prevented them from fulfilling a fixture, but simply hording talent so nobody else could get it would not be allowed.

Secondly, and just as importantly, the number of substitutes at each game should be reduced from five to three, instead of increased to seven as will happen next season.

The impact of squad size would be reduced, and fringe players at the Big Four' would be dispersed throughout the league.

The Big Four' would no doubt oppose the proposals, and if we were lucky, they might throw their toys out of the pram completely and form a breakaway European Super League. Now that really would do wonders for Premier League competition.

IS Newcastle Falcons' decision to sell Toby Flood and Mathew Tait proof that it is disadvantageous to have a squad full of England internationals, or confirmation that the club is teetering on the brink of collapse?

Sadly, the speed with which Leicester and Sale snapped up the North-Easterners suggests it is probably the latter.

For all Dave Thompson's assurances about Super 14 replacements, last weekend's events are a continuation of the mounting crisis that has led to the sale of Kingston Park, the departure of John Fletcher and a desperately disappointing season in the Guinness Premiership.

Jonny Wilkinson or no Jonny Wilkinson, relegation next season - and it is far from impossible given Northampton's return to the top-flight - and it could well be the beginning of the end for the Falcons.

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