I’m just trying to speak strictly in pragmatic terms of what makes English football so good/important in the modern era. As an American, having a pyramid linking effectively every single team in the country is an incredibly cool concept that’s, unfortunately, all but a pipe dream here (we have hundreds of college football and basketball teams here with diehard fanbases and rich histories— it’d be amazing if they somehow had a competitive link to the NFL and NBA, for example).

My point is only that, while we all love a Leicester story, the dream of an underdog isn’t what brings in the foreign dollar, euro, etc. year over year (after all, Leicester is one of only two titles won by a non-Top Six club in the ~30 year history of the PL). The accessibility of the league to most of the world language-wise and fandoms associated with the top end of the league are why people keep tuning into the PL rather than the others. The Premier League is an English League rooted in English culture, but at this point it’s a global media enterprise funded (and, I don’t have numbers in front of me, but perhaps even owned) in majority by foreign sources.

English football’s strength is the rich history of so many clubs

I think you’re wholly wrong here. English league football is so strong today because it has more money than any other league on Earth, and it has more money because of:

• The formation of the Premier League allowing top clubs to maximize TV revenue better than any other league

• English being the global lingua franca, allowing fans around the world to understand + interact with league media

• England’s colonial legacy making English culture (including English football) more relevant than most other major footballing nations around the world

As a personal anecdote: I’m American. I am a diehard for my local MLS club, but I still enjoy watching the highest levels of football, which is found predominately in the five major European leagues. Theoretically, I could watch any of those leagues, but I don’t speak Spanish, German, Italian, or French. I do, however, speak English. I don’t have to go out of my way to find Premier League content in a language I understand to begin with, and because I speak the PL’s primary language, the universe of available content is so much larger than what I could find for any of those other leagues.

To use an objective rough metric of popularity, the Premier League now earns more money from foreign TV broadcasts than it does domestic, and those foreign TV earnings alone are greater than the totals for any other league. The PL is one of the strongest sports media products in the world, and as a result it’s the biggest moneymaker in world football, which has fueled the PL’s ascent as the most popular league around.

I don’t mean to say this to be cynical or crass, but to be quite honest the median foreign viewer really does not care about the lower levels of the pyramid. It’s charming and fun when a League One team manages to beat a PL side in the FA Cup, but outside of the top 20-40 teams in the pyramid foreign fans are not regularly concerned with what’s going on. The vast majority of foreign viewers are tuning in on Saturdays because they want to see what United, City, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea, or Spurs are doing (maybe also with an eye for which mid table teams have taken their perhaps once-in-a-decade run at finishing in the top 8), and maybe they have a more expansive view if they’re one of the few who’ve hitched their wagon to a non-Top Six club.

Obviously the view in England itself is quite different I’m sure, but this is a league that makes most of its money nowadays outside of England.