The Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson and the Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger has said that they do not believe that the Premier league is on the decline even though the league has only two representatives in the last 16 stage of the Champions League competition.

Manchester city and the current holders of the competitions Chelsea have both crashed out of the competition at the group stages itself. Even though Chelsea have the Europa league to still play for the rest of the season, Manchester city are out of the European competitions entirely as a result of finishing bottom of the group.

Despite this failure coupled with Manchester United’s inability to get past the group stages last season, many have been saying that Premier league is on the decline. Ferguson and Wenger, though, believes that both these two seasons are exceptions rather than examples. Ferguson has said that European competitions have been disappointing for most of the English clubs apart from Chelsea in recent years. However, he thinks that the league is still one of the most exciting in Europe, which is the reason for attracting lot of audience for every match. Wenger has also said the same thing along with the fact that he felt the margin of error was extremely small in European competitions.

“Europe has certainly been disappointing for Premier League teams – Chelsea apart – in the last couple of years, whereas for quite a few years prior to that we had three teams in the semi-finals and an all-English final between ourselves and Chelsea [2008]. Sometimes, however, you get blips but I don’t see this happening consistently as I feel English teams will always be challenging in the latter stages of the Champions League,” said Ferguson, whose Manchester United team have qualified as the group winners.