Are one-horse races now the rule, not the exception?
Suspense has been in short supply across the major domestic leagues of Europe. Chelsea won the Premier League at a canter, derided as boring in their approach, a judgment that tends to land on any team that plays cautiously against direct title rivals in a situation where their superiority over those rivals is quite pronounced.
Bayern Munich have a different habit: so remote are their nearest challengers in the Bundesliga, they have got into a habit to taking the last third of the season as holiday. They again won their league very early, as in the last three seasons now, and then lost matches frequently once the trophy had been seized.
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Juventus, meanwhile, took the Serie A title for a fourth successive season, with room to spare. Bayern and Chelsea envied Juve for their capacity to maintain intensity, despite their clear domestic authority, into the business end of the Uefa Champions League, where the Italians will contest a Champions League final – the competition Chelsea won in 2012, and Bayern in 2013 – on Saturday.
Juve’s opponents in Berlin, Barcelona, needed to sweat until the penultimate day of Primera Liga, pursued vigorously by Real Madrid. As for France’s Ligue 1, that produced an unforeseen closeness in its championship race. Paris Saint-Germain, who outpunch the rest of the league by a wealth differential unlike that of any top league, were chased determinedly by first Marseille, and then Lyon, before they secured the title.
Is Primera Liga now clearly the best top flight on the continent?
For the second year in succession there is a high chance Spain will have produced the champions of the two most important continental trophies, the Europa League, retained by Sevilla, and the European Cup, whose final Barcelona go into as firm favourites.
Five Spanish teams, thanks to the ticket Uefa now gives to the Europa League holders, will be in the Champions League come August.
There is strength in depth in Spain: La Liga has had three different champions in the last four years. Athletic Bilbao, fourth-placed last season, finished runners-up to Barca in the Copa del Rey, and Valencia were strong enough to finish above an impressive Sevilla in the table.
Atletico Madrid remain feisty, and Real Madrid are sure to reinforce this summer, under a new head coach, probably Rafa Benitez, and should be optimistic that the very special James Rodriguez develops into a true world-class star.
Are Barcelona building another dynasty?
The champions of Spain can complete a treble in Berlin. Shades of 2009, when the squad coached by Pep Guardiola, then a novice as a senior head coach, established Barca as the most watchable, and serially successful elite team in the world.
Under Luis Enrique, they needed a period of time to find their bearings, but since January they have been a compelling force.
There are clouds on the horizon, however. There is institutional uncertainty at the top, with the president under pressure and the inheritor of all sorts of legal issues.
One is the controversial details of the Neymar transfer, of June 2013.
The other is the Fifa punishment for signing players under 16 without the correct protocol. That led to transfer ban that prevents any additions this year from outside the club to a squad that while ample, would ideally like to cover one of two positions, like right-back where the dynamic Dani Alves may depart.
How good is second best in the Bundesliga?
Saturday’s German Cup final tried to provide a clue to that. The first point to applaud is that Bayern were not in it. They don’t dominate everything in Germany, and indeed Wolfsburg, who finished second in the Bundesliga, and Dortmund, who won the league in 2011 and 2012, actually managed to beat Bayern in meaningful matches this year – Wolfsburg in a dazzling 4-1 Bundesliga win in January and Dortmund, via penalties, in the Cup.
Wolfsburg defeated Dortmund 3-1 in the Cup final, and look a team who might go far in Europe next season but still lack anything like Bayern’s playing resources or variety of options. There is much to admire in the methods, organisation and entertainment levels in the top flight of German football, but the distance between Bayern and the others may actually be having a corrosive effect, not only on the demoralised 17 non-challengers, but on the dominators, too.
Bayern, who tend to go into April under little domestic pressure, have been outclassed in their last pair of Champions League semi-finals.
Is there life at San Siro?
Well, at least the two Milan clubs both managed to finish in the top half of the Serie A table, but when Inter Milan sit eighth, and AC Milan 10th – respectively three, and two, places lower than 12 months ago – there is clearly a crisis in what used to be known as the heavyweight division of Italian football.
Foreign investment, in the form of Indonesian Erick Thohir’s stake, has not cured Inter of their skittish tendencies, nor has the return of Roberto Mancini as head coach. Milan are seeking funding from outside, but find that a having a famous name without access to any European competition, means they are a hard sell.
The power in Serie A resides very obviously in Juventus’s corner of Turin, and next-best is the capital. Rome could send two clubs into the next Champions League, provided Lazio get through an August play-off.
Can Ligue 1 also-rans hang on to its young French stars?
It’s been an unexpectedly thrilling season in France’s top flight, partly because Marseille started at such a pace and had the eccentric Marcelo Bielsa in charge. Like many of his projects, the season began more forcefully than it ended. But Lyon took up the gauntlet as genuine challengers to super-wealthy PSG and maintained the chase.
A feature of all the teams in PSG’s slipstream was young French talent, players such as Ligue 1’s leading scorer, Alex Lacazette, his Lyon colleague Nabil Fekir, and the likes of Monaco’s Geoffrey Kondogbia.
They will have an real eye on their chance to impress globally with the French national team at Euro 2016, to be hosted in France, but will also be eagerly eyed up by predatory clubs, particularly in the Premier League, in the transfer windows before then. PSG, a very international squad, will only be challenged by other clubs in Ligue 1 if those clubs can continue nurture their own talent fruitfully, and keep hold of it.
What do they feed Portuguese managers?
Andre Vilas-Boas, still only 37, won the second league title of his coaching career, guiding Zenit Saint-Petersburg to the Russian championship. AVB, as he more often known, used to be nicknamed Mou II, because he is a former assistant to Jose Mourinho – who has just won his eighth league title, his third at Chelsea – and apparently a disciple of Mourinho, his Portuguese compatriot.
But he’s not only one in the Lusophone queue. Valencia’s top-four finish in Spain, and with it their return to the Champions League, owed much to the work of Nuno Espirito Santo, another up-and-coming young tactician from Portugal.
In the Champions League, the performances of Monaco impressed, Portuguese coach Leonardo Jardim building an impressively compact side after a summer transfer window which weakened the playing resources he was in charge of.
Benfica, meanwhile, won the title in the country so fertile with managerial talent, under their enduring warrior Jorge Jesus, who will at some point probably accept an offer to take his vivacious touchline presence somewhere beyond his native country.
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