4 reasons the Premier League will get better

...and one reason it might not.

With Arsenal exiting the Champions League by way of a trademark first-leg loss, second-leg win that still wasn't enough, English sides are one step closer to going out of Europe's premier club competition. Liverpool exited in the group stage, Chelsea lost to PSG last week and Manchester City are almost certain to exit after their first-leg loss at home against Barcelona. The Europa League hasn't gone much better for English teams: Everton is the only team from the Premier League remaining in that competition.

Domestically, things aren't going any better. A league full of teams that embarrass themselves in Europe often creates a weird, wide-open fun league with wacky results -- Serie A and the Bundesliga have had seasons like this in the past decade. Instead, the Premier League has an entirely predictable top five, but one in which the title is already decided and none of the games between the top teams are particularly fun. It's left fans longing for the 'Traditional Big Four' they used to complain about. At least those teams were really, really good at football and their games were massive events everyone could get excited about.

We didn't understand what we had until it was gone. Now, Manchester United are starting Marouane Fellaini at striker and Arsene Wenger is hailing Francis Coquelin as a revelation in midfield. Do these teams have no dignity? Have they forgotten how to be proper big clubs? This is awful.

The good news is that the Premier League is in a position that's almost impossible toreally screw up. It's a down year, sure, but they're not about to spiral from best to fifth-best league in the world semi-overnight like Serie A did. They have too many advantages, the ways to improve are too easy not to figure out and some of the things plaguing the league are downright weird occurrences that will work themselves out over time.

Here are four reasons why this is probably not going to happen again.

1. This huge group of bad decision-makers is an anomaly

Manchester United CEO Ed Woodward, Manchester City director of football Txiki Begiristain, Arsenal GodKing Arsene Wenger and the famed Liverpool Transfer Committee are all very different kinds of decision-makers. Incredibly, all four of them have done very, very bad jobs over the last couple of transfer windows.

Because all of these teams have done strangely poor business recently, we can't point to one model and say it doesn't work. These four teams have four distinctly different models for conducting transfer business and did so (roughly) equally poorly.

Eventually, someone (or all of these teams) will hire a better executive or change the way they make decisions and their transfer strategy will improve immensely. There's no way that four teams with approaches this different can all suck forever.

2. Others will learn from Liverpool's resurgence

Pour one out for Sir Alex Ferguson, who was a master at adjusting his team's formation and style of play to suit his available players and counter his opponent. Since his departure, the Premier League has developed a fairly homogeneous style of play -- the default setup is 4-2-3-1, possession-based with opportunistic fast counter-attacking, with a defensive line that's high enough to compress space but not suicidally high. Teams switch it up when they have injuries, when they're chasing a game or when they're defending a lead, but this is the default for most of the league.

Liverpool decided to switch to a 3-4-3/3-4-2-1 setup in the second half of the season even though they hardly have the central defenders or hard-working midfielders to play this way and certainly don't have the wingbacks. It's worked wonders mostly because it's something different than what every other team does week in, week out. No one is really sure how to attack or defend it.

This setup will get figured out, just as every tactic in the history of the sport has. But the point isn't that Liverpool have some magic formula that should be copied. The point is that their willingness to try something different should be copied. The league is going to be a lot more fun when it's less tactically homogeneous, and Liverpool's push from the bottom half towards the top four offers evidence that there's an incentive to take risks with new tactics.

3. There are only 3 truly great teams in the world

Atlético Madrid and Borussia Dortmund are having nice little runs, Juventus are pretty solid, AS Monaco have a good manager and Paris Saint-Germain's financial clout will keep them relevant for the foreseeable future. But all of these teams have ceilings imposed by their lack of television money and worldwide reach, and that's not changing anytime soon.

Here are the complete list of genuinely huge teams that it will always be hard for any Premier League team to compete with: Real Madrid, Barcelona and Bayern Munich. That's it. That's the entire list of teams that have the ability to draw top talent at the same level as the top Premier League clubs. These goalposts aren't moving.

4. They have four years to figure it out

We don't know how long the Premier League will be the richest league on Earth, but it's a good bet that it'll be at least until the end of the 2018-19 season. That's when their current domestic TV deal ends. The big five don't have to get themselves sorted out this summer, really. They have at least another summer or two of being dumb before it has the potential to actually catch up with them.

And that's where the problems come in.

★★★

There are a lot of reasons to believe that the Premier League will rebound and become the best league in the world again in short order. What about the one really good reason that might not happen?

Being stupid currently has minimal consequences

The biggest problem with the Premier League's giant and long-running TV deal is that it removes consequences for operating a team poorly. Sure, it's embarrassing for big Premier League teams to miss out on the Champions League quarterfinals, but an early exit from the Champions League or a deep run is no longer the difference between a thrifty transfer window and having the money to buy stars.

Manchester City are facing financial fair play sanctions, and, yet, they still have enough money to spend £25 million on Wilfried Bony. Manchester United decided to sign Falcao, a striker who hadn't yet proven he'd recovered from an ACL tear, and agree to pay him the highest wage in the league. Liverpool paid £20 million for Dejan Lovren, who had one decent, but not great, Premier League season behind him and has been genuinely poor for his new club. None of these teams* will face financial difficulties as a result of these decisions and will have plenty of money to sign new players this coming summer.

*Arsenal, weirdly, have a completely different problem. They spend money on players who are really good, but who they don't need, and refuse to address their weaknesses.

Blowing £20-plus million on a crappy player used to be a massive setback that held a Premier League team back for five years. It's now an utterly meaningless mistake. Teams only truly suffer if they make a series of 10 of them.

When there's no real negative consequence for wasting huge sums of money and exiting Champions League early, where's the incentive to re-evaluate your player acquisition and development strategies? There's another £50 million or more in transfer funds lying around to just try again next year.

Let's hope that isn't the case. This league used to be awesome, and it can be awesome again.