------------------Kane (200m)
Sterling (150m)--Maddison (90m)--Sancho (120m)
------------Winks (50m)----Rice (50m)
Shaw/Chilwell (30m)--Maguire (80m)--Gomez (50m)--TAA (75m)
That squad would cost about 900m, and still I'm not sure it would land the League title.
No international team could win the PL. That's an absolutely absurd benchmark.
Beating any team 4-0 is a good result nowadays. I ve seen England struggling against shit teams in the past, so a 4-0 win is more than welcome
For starters, this is all true. To add on: people have this ridiculous idea that the scoreline differential in a game should be a linear function of the difference in quality between the two teams, which is completely wrong.
The top international teams will very often, if not the overwhelming majority of the time, score more against a 30th-ranked team that comes to play and win than a 60th-ranked team that deploys a 9-1-0 formation.
The only exceptions occur with teams ranked near the very bottom, like San Marino, full of part-timers who can't even park the bus effectively against good teams. In those cases, it
is as simple as judging teams by the extent to which they slaughter the minnow. (I say this with the best of intentions; I'm always happy when San Marino
et al. get a result, unless it's against us)
Furthermore, to the people who say that watching England is boring, it's because you're not really very invested in England. As someone whose only team is England, it's much like watching your club team play far worse opposition: you wouldn't describe it as boring, even though other clubs' supporters would, because you massively care about the outcome and the win above all else.
There's also nothing the England team can do that's going to make qualifiers particularly exciting for neutrals or to raise the stakes. They're playing minnows where the disparity in quality is too big to even occur domestically outside of the FA Cup (and maybe LC). Taken in that context, watching England is no more boring than a lot of early-round FA Cup ties that follow the same basic key-vs-lock formula.
Other top teams playing minnows are usually equally "boring" from the perspective of pure footballing spectacle -- and if you think we're boring now where were you 4 years ago? That team got hard for
me to watch at times. We're actually so much better than we were a few years back when squeezing out 1-0 wins against the same standard of opposition. Now we're taking everyone down for 4 or 5 and no match with that many goals can be entirely boring. The current standard is pornographic compared to what I've had to endure in recent memory.
Qualifiers are by their very nature boring affairs in Europe for any (semi-)neutral because of the teams UEFA has to deal with. The only universally interesting occasions are when two big rivals and/or very well-matched countries meet (40th vs 45th is almost always more interesting than 4th vs 45th). I don't support a pre-qualifying stage for constructed moral reasons but there's no doubt that it would drastically improve the average standard of matches.
I imagine I feel the same way about, say, Newcastle vs Southampton as some of you do about the average England qualifier. There are many objectively, horrendously boring matches even in the PL.
And, yes, supporting England as your only team is as arduous as it sounds. I just can't bring myself to support a corporation: only supporting countries makes sense to me. But, hey, I guess Man City would be a good fit if I ever change my mind.