No More Kick and Rush

It's the third time in seven years that one national league has sent three teams to the Champions League semi-finals. Spain achieved that feat in 2000, and Italy followed suit in 2003.

Soccer is a game of streaks, and leagues, just like teams, can go cold as quickly as they get hot. Nonetheless, there are a couple of good reasons to think that English clubs might be ready to take over the game the way they did from 1977 to 1982, when Liverpool, Nottingham Forest and Aston Villa won the old European Cup six times on the trot.

The first is money. The Premiership changed forever when Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea in 2003. Abramovich famously pumped hundreds of millions of euros into the club for transfer fees and salaries, and England's Big Three -- Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal -- were forced to follow suit.

With the twinkle of pound signs in their eyes, the world's best players now vie to ply their trade on the island. On the other hand, the Premiership is the world's most popular league, which brings in huge revenues, and Forbes magazine lists all four of the clubs named above as among the globe's 10 richest.

Moreover, unlike Real Madrid and Barcelona, who also spent big to get good, English clubs have focussed on acquiring a broad range of first-rate talent and not a handful of celebrity names.

Didier Drogba and Christiano Ronaldo may not be media stars in the sense of David Beckham, but you'd pick either one of them over Becks if you were trying to building a Champions League-winning squad.

That brings us to the style of play in English soccer. Long gone are the days of kick and rush. These days Premiership clubs combine the hard-nosed defense featured in Italy in 2003 with the lightning-quick, relentless attacking of the 2000 Spanish vintage.

Man Utd started the trend in 1990s, but the quantum leap came in 2003-4 when Arsenal, playing a Continental style of soccer under French coach Arsene Wenger, went on an amazing 49-game unbeaten streak.

Faced with the specter of trophy raising becoming an annual event at Highbury, the other elite English clubs revamped their squads and their basic approaches and become more complete teams.

The results, as shown by Man Utd's 7-1 demolition of AS Roma in the Champions League quarterfinals, can be very frightening indeed.

But lest English soccer fans get too euphoric, there's a rather negative flip-side. Relying as heavily as it does on international talents and influences, the Premiership's current run of excellence is hardly likely to translate into an improvement for the English national squad.

Thus, while the Premiership's big four may haul some serious silverware in coming international club competitions, there's little reason to believe that the Three Lions will reap anything in the Euro 2008 or the next World Cup but their by-now customary frustration.

Jefferson Chase writes regularly about soccer for DW-WORLD.DE