to be fair, until the last 9 years of Bayern domination the Bundesliga was far more competative than the prem.
Dortmund
Wolfsburg
StuttgartBremen
Kaiserlauten
all winners from memory
IMO FFP has a lot to do with the Bayern and Juventus runs at the top.
It's been great for us, since the pay-to-play nature of our youth system means you can scout over here at a profit. Your clubs flocked over here looking for talent under FFP, and once they started seriously looking discovered that we did have elite club talent after all. We just did a lousy job of developing it until you all arrived on our shores in force, because our pay-to-play system had been about generating profit for business entities rather than, you know, actually developing talent.
But it's been lousy for you all, as FFP's revenue-at-all-costs imperative led to some seriously short-term thinking that, in my opinion, led to your academies being turned into profit centers (as in the case of Barca) or generally being neglected. The top clubs ended up in a big money arms race to sign the top players in order to win the trophies and secure the most lucrative sponsorships, so they could sign more players and perpetuate the cycle.
The guilty party who touched all of that off, of course, is none other than Florentino Perez himself, who was run out of the club the last time his big-dollar signings failed to compete. The first round of Galacticos led directly to the influx of foreign owners with deep pockets, as owners decided they either could not or did not want to play his game, and found owners that would.
Along the way, your biggest clubs and Barca lost their souls trying to compete with the grandiose Perez vision for Real Madrid, which arguably since the di Stefano days never had one.
