Its our time! What has inspired English teams to qualify for the UEFA Champions League

While Brexit looms large over the country, Britain’s Premier League is doing its best to dominate Europe with a remarkable turnaround in fortunes in the Champions League .

Friday’s quarter-final draw will be the first to include four English teams in ten years a throwback to the 2000s, when the Premier League also ruled.

English football has not had a Champions League winner since Chelsea seven years ago, and did not have a single team reach the last eight in both 2012-13 and 2014-15. They were performing so badly there was a possibility the Premier League would lose one of its four places in the tournament.

This year though, the bookies made it odds-on there will be an English winner.

Manchester City are the outright favourites and statisticians say there is a 39% chance that a Premier League team will lift the trophy at the final in Madrid on June 1. Speaking of number-crunching, there is a 66% chance we will get an all-English quarter-final.

The big question being asked now is why has there been a resurgence of English football, overtaking the recent dominance of Spanish teams in the Champions League.

There are several factors one of them being clearly Pep Guardiola’s Man City who thrashed Schalke 04 who has since relieved their coach of his duties.

They have undoubtedly pushed the barriers of success with a record breaking Premier League season last year biggest points tally ever, most wins, most consecutive wins and biggest title winning margin.

They are doing it again this time: top scorers in the Champions League and having won by six goals or more on seven separate occasions across all competitions this season.

City also have Guardiola, who won the Champions League twice while in charge of Barcelona , has bags of European experience and was brought to Manchester for exactly that reason.

This is now the third time in four seasons that the Blues have reached the quarter-finals.The knock-on effect for the other English clubs is that City’s success pushes them to keep up.

Liverpool were City’s conquerers in the last-eight a year ago and became the first club to break the £100m barrier in profit terms after going on to make the Champions League Final.

That influx of cash allowed them to build a stronger squad and now they have a world-class keeper in Alisson to go with their world-class centre-half Virgil van Dijk, while keeping hold of last year’s top scorer Mohamed Salah was never an issue.

Manchester United have the pedigree and history, and a manager in 1999 Treble hero Ole Gunnar Solskjaer to remind their players of that.

Tottenham nearly went out in the group stages after taking one point from the first three games, but got an away draw with Barcelona to qualify before thrashing then-Bundesliga leaders Borussia Dortmund 4-0 on aggregate.

Despite what Spurs boss Mauricio Pochettino says, the Premier League’s top brass have tried to play their part. Not quite postponing games for Champions League clubs as they do in France or letting them play on Friday nights the weekend before European games like in Germany, but not far off.

The Premier League set about making sure – where possible – that teams in the Champions League would play their TV games on Saturdays rather than Sundays.

Although Liverpool and Tottenham were not able to recently as the games had already been planned before the Champions League draw, the chaos of recent seasons has been diluted.

It does leave the armchair viewer to watch Snooze Sunday rather than Super Sunday as mid-table games are served up rather than top-of-the-table clashes, but it is done to help the clubs.

Furthermore, England pride themselves on having an elite generation coming through, so player development is good enough to persuade Bundesliga clubs to try to sign the best youngsters in Premier League academies.

Football tends to go in cycles.Germany is on a downward spiral. England is on the up.

The long term aim is to remain pretty consistent just as Spain has done down the years. That is the hallmark of longevity and success.

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