Newcastle Players Lead Premier League Into Europe

Tim Krul, Yohan Cabaye and Hatem Ben Arfa are just 3 of the 74 players at the European Championships who currently play in the English Premier League.

They add up to 20% of the 368 players travelling to Poland and Ukraine, the highest number by far of any league.

The German Bundesliga is next up with 13%, followed by La Liga in Spain with 9% and then the Italian and Russian leagues each with 8%.

No doubt the spin that would be put on this from the English bureaucrats is that this figure confirms the English Premier League as the most prestigious, others would argue that it is simply down to the fact that players can earn more money in England than anywhere else.

I wouldn’t mind betting that if you lined up the 100 highest paid players at the Euros, you would find almost every one of those 74 Premier League players on the list, even the likes of Robert Green who played Championship football last season.

Our eyes of course will be trained on the three Newcastle players as well as I suppose on the mainly tedious collection of  individuals representing England.

It would be ironic if they somehow did a ‘Chelsea’ and fluked their way to win it when expectations have never been so low, Greece in 2004 proved that anything is possible with a limited group of players in such a short format of only 16 teams. Would you bet on it?