Disagree. Liverpool's owners have spent - not as much as City/Chelsea, but they've been spending around £50m a season recently, and the only reason that UEFA didn't investigate them for their massive financial losses was because they only investigate teams playing in Europe, which Liverpool haven't been this year. Arsenal have done well by the standards of most of the league, but they've gone a decade without a trophy, and just when they might win the FA Cup, they look like falling out of the Champions League. This will force them to invest more or suffer years of mediocrity, and I fear they might just accept the mediocrity instead of investing. As I already said, Arsenal's fans are calling for Kroenke's head precisely because he refuses to commit money to the project. He's seen as holding them back. As for United, well the only reason they've remained successful is because their huge operating profits have kept them afloat. God forbid they ever start to make losses because it could cause untold damage, especially with some seriously hefty loan refinancing to be done before 2017. It's not for no reason that the press are saying that they might refuse to enter the Europa League so that they can pack their calendar with friendlies next season, for which a PL club can typically earn several million pounds per game.
You're right about the attraction of the PL, although I'd argue that merely being competitive is not the whole story. I mean, Serie A has seen some real volatility in terms of its giants falling from grace recently. Up until PSG, Ligue 1 was similarly open to a number of clubs, at least since Olympique Marseille's dominance ended about 6-7 years ago. And yet they're not as big. As for the upper echelons, I think the only way you could argue that England doesn't have any top category teams is if you reserve the top category solely for Real and Barca, and let's be honest, the reason they are so attractive is that you can afford to do things like building a team of galacticos or grooming an entire team from your youth academy when 80% of the opposition are so poor that you can win half of your games by at least four goals, when the league rules allow you to negotiate individual £200m/year TV deals (which, incidentally, will no longer happen from 2016 so bye bye massive revenues) and when the Spanish government itself breaks the system to ensure that you have all the money you could ever need. Spain's top two are there but by the grace of a massively flawed national system which is being rectified. In 10 years they will still be the top two clubs, but they won't quite seem the world-dominating diamonds of the game, I suspect.
As for MLS, you're very right that you have some huge cities in the US, and they lend very well to making for packed stadia of die-hard fans. But the issue is capturing the imagination of the rest of the world. We don't really care how big your cities are, just as I'm sure you don't care about how big ours are. Sure, we know more of your cities than we know of yours but as we've previously debated, glorying in the reputation and character of a city is an American trait, not a European, or really rest-of-the-world type trait. You may have some exotic cities, but people outside the US won't really care. After all, who cares if Miami has 200 miles of pristine beaches if none of them appear on the TV screens during the games. People from outside the US aren't ever going to see those cities in person anyway, except perhaps once in their lives to make a pilgrimage to their favourite MLS club. It works the same with European clubs. Madrid, for example, is a complete hole. It's an over-industrialised city with no character. But Real are a glamour club. Similarly, Liverpool is really not an attractive city. Neither is Dortmund. But they attract world followings because of their teams, not because of their cities. The only way an MLS club will become a world power is through on-field performance.
