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28 WHEN Atletico Madrid's Wanda Metropolitano sta- dium was named as the host venue for this year's Cham- pions League final, three sto- rylines caught the imagination in Spain. Would Diego Simeone's team seize European glory on their home turf? Would Real Madrid saunter across town to retain their continental su- premacy? Or would Lionel Messi lead Barcelona to an- other crown? The answers... no, no and no. All three of the Spanish heav- yweights squandered first-leg leads to exit the tournament before yesterday's grand fi- nale, which was instead con- tested between Liverpool and Tottenham to ensure a first non-Spanish winner since 2013. There was a similar story in the Europa League, which had been the near-exclusive do- main of La Liga teams too in recent years. This time, it was an all-English affair as Chelsea overcame Arsenal in Baku. After a decade of almost non- stop success, La Liga's failure to produce even one finalist this season could be seen as the end of an era. Should Spanish football be worried that the tide has turned? Spain's decade of dominance Since 2009, Real Madrid have won the Champions League four times, with Barcelona tri- umphing on three occasions, while Atletico Madrid also reached two finals: a total of nine finalists and seven win- ners. Meanwhile, English teams made it to the final only four times, with Chelsea's victory over Bayern Munich in 2012 the solitary title for a Premier League representative. Spanish sides also exerted a stranglehold in the Europa League, a competition which provides a good indication of a domestic league's strength in depth: Sevilla took the trophy three times in a row between 2014 and 2016, while Atletico were also three-time winners, including a victory in the 2012 final over another Spanish team, Athletic Bilbao. Those results suggest La Liga's superiority was by no means restricted to the 'big two'. Not any longer, however. Perhaps even more telling than Barcelona's defeat against Liverpool in this season's Champions League semi-finals was what happened at the same stage in the Europa League: Ar- senal thrashed in-form Valen- cia side 7-3 on aggregate. On paper, the fourth-placed team in La Liga facing the fifth- best team in England should have been a close contest; on grass, it became a mismatch. At first sight, there appears to be one obvious explanation for the new-found dominance of English football: money. As a commercial entity, the Premier League is vastly more successful than all its conti- nental counterparts. That was evidenced by the staggering fact that Huddersfield, despite finishing bottom of the league, earned more television revenue this season than every La Liga club except Real Madrid and Barcelona did during the 2017- 18 campaign. Cold, hard cash obviously gives Premier League teams an advantage - why should Valen- cia be expected to compete on an even footing with an Arse- nal team whose two strikers cost nearly as much as their whole starting XI? However, that kind of finan- cial disparity has been in place for some time, and it didn't make that much difference over the past 10 years. Finan- cial might contributes, but it can't be everything - or Pre- mier League clubs would have hoovered up far more trophies than they actually have. So if it's not a mere matter of money, what has changed? What is England now doing right, and what has Spain start- ed to do badly? The best coaches Former Cameroon interna- tional Lauren, who started and finished his career in Spain either side of eight seasons in England with Arsenal and Portsmouth, believes there is a simple explanation for the Premier League's upsurge this season. "The smart thing that Pre- mier League teams did was to sign the best coaches in the world," says Lauren, who now lives in Seville and works as a pundit for La Liga TV. "Managers such as Pep Guar- diola, Jurgen Klopp and Mau- ricio Pochettino have changed the mentality of English foot- ball. "They have created a different Premier League which still has the same intensity and speed but those coaches have also added lots of different ideas. Now we are seeing the results." Those "different ideas" can be broadly summarised as the im- plementation of a possession- based game. In 2015-16 - the last season before Guardiola's arrival at Manchester City - the average number of passes made in a game by the Premier League's top six was 481.3. This season, that figure jumped to 599.1. "English football has abso- lutely changed since my ca- reer," continues Lauren. "There are lots of new methods, tactics and ideas, even the behaviour of players off the pitch. "It all comes from Pep's meth- ods of playing from the back, starting with the goalkeeper, switching play, keeping the ball moving, pressing with inten- sity. "That style of play first came to England years ago with Arsene Wenger, but now the new breed of coaches have built on those ideas and changed English football for the better." Spain's foremost television pundit is former Liverpool for- ward Michael Robinson, who finished his playing career with Osasuna in the late 1980s and has stayed in the country ever since. Robinson agrees with Lau- ren's assessment, noting that it took English football a while to accept the need to embrace overseas influences if they wanted to enjoy success in Eu- rope. In an extensive Champions League analysis aired this week on TV channel #vamos, Robin- son said: "English football has been rich for many years with- out winning. "They invested in a lot of very good foreign players, but not in the architects. They've now realised they needed a different approach… a different vision of football that wasn't [tradition- maltatoday | SUNDAY • 2 JUNE 2019 SPORTS English clubs' success causes self-doubt for Spain's top teams Champions League Spanish teams have won the Champions League in seven of the past 10 seasons - Real Madrid's victory over Liverpool in 2018 was their fourth title in five years