I would have to disagree with that, looking at it as a foreign football fan looking for a team what would you find impressive....
Coming second in the league or....
Winning the FA Cup (the most famous domestic cup in the world).
To us there may be one meaning, to others it may be totally different. People are impressed by teams that win things they know not runners up.
I disagree. TV rights deals get bigger with every cycle for good reason. Official PL figures estimate that the global market audience for PL games for the 2015/16 season was just over 900 million people, up from 730 million in 2014/15, which in turn was up from 645 million in 2013/14.
By all accounts, Leicester's fairytale that season and the arrival on our shores of 2 of the biggest managers in the game in Pep and Conte (Klopp doesn't count) points to the reality that when the number-crunchers and analysts have done their thing on this season's figures, the market will have comfortably crossed the
1 billion mark.
Let that number sink in. That is how many people the PL believes are already, or at least are on the brink of, watching PL football on a semi-regular to regular basis.
This season saw the most-watched match in PL history when Pep and Jose faced off early in the season. It was the first time that numbers from a PL game looked capable of rubbing shoulders with the numbers El Clasico is able to boast of. We're talking upwards of 30 million TV sets broadcasting the match from New Zealand to Alaska (the data does not and cannot take into account how many people are crammed into the pub/bar/living room so in reality 60-70 million is a far more realistic total). When you delve into these figures a bit more, it is absolutely no surprise that we are made to suffer the strangest of kick-off times to indulge some faceless mass of fans on the other side of the globe.
And this data's trajectory is only going in one direction. Sure, the FA cup final is still one of the most watched games in all of world football, but the difference in today's money-driven era is that more and more people are "clued up" and "tuned in" to the wider PL picture. They simply aren't going to take Arsenal's victory at 'face value' and decide 'now that's a successful club'. On the contrary, most of them will be as knowledgeable of the Wenger soap opera as we Brits are and will be
well aware that the club finished 5th, has no CL football and hasn't challenged for a title in a decade.
Cini has missed my point entirely. Success nowadays isn't exclusively defined by trophies. Exciting, entertaining football fueled by young poster boys and mature mega-stars is the way forward. Gareth Bale's sheer existence was our foot into the American market. Son and Kane appear to be the feet to barge open the door to the Far East. Dele Alli is worshipped by a young and impressionable global audience. Sure, Arsenal have a major trophy - and well done to them. But in what way was their season memorable? In what sense were
any of their players 'memorable'?