On the slide: How English football's continental crash points to a Premier League in decline

Games three and four will be played under the floodlights in London on March 6 and March 14 but anything other than two Italian teams in the quarter-final draw would represent an upset.

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English football’s continental crash on black Wednesday in Milan and grey Tuesday in Naples points to more than just the main actors fumbling their lines on the overseas stage.

Across four halves of football, the Italian league, which has suffered over the last decade while the Premier League has prospered, gave the English game a lesson.

But these were not tutorials in the age-old art of scoring one goal, shutting up shop and protecting a lead.

Arsenal and Chelsea were beaten at their own game. Milan and Napoli put smothering tactics to one side and instead ripped their opponents apart with imagination and adventure.

Edinson Cavani proved every bit as hot to handle on Tuesday as Zlatan Ibrahimovic six days earlier while the magnificent Ezequiel Lavezzi was even more dynamic in the intimidating Stadio San Paolo arena than Robinho had been at San Siro.

While there is still some hope for Chelsea of turning around their tie, the Premier League is kidding itself if it believes this is just a blip in its never-ending quest for world domination.

With title heavyweights Manchester United and Manchester City fighting in the middleweight division of the Europa League on Thursday nights, there is the unwelcome prospect for the league, which prides itself on being the world’s best, not having a single English club in the last eight of the Champions League.

You have to go all the way back to 1995-96 for the last time that English football received such a kick in the teeth.

Those were the days when the land that dominated the European landscape for a decade up until the mid-1980s was still recovering from the after-effects of Heysel and the early 1990s cap on non-English players.

What is the excuse now? Bar the 2010 clash between Inter and Bayern Munich, a Premier League club has contested every Champions League final going back to 2004. In 2008, the rain-sodden final contested by United and Chelsea in Moscow represented the high water mark for the English game.

Other than in 2010, there has been a Premier League representative in the semi-finals of the Champions League for every year going back to 2003. In both 2008 (United, Chelsea and Liverpool) and 2009 (United, Chelsea and Arsenal), England had three representatives in the last four of the competition.

Back then, it seemed the only way the Premier League clubs could be defeated was if they knocked each other out.

That has changed. Assuming Chelsea do not produce one of the greatest nights in their European history at the Bridge next month, the only English club to have contested a semi-final in the last three year was United, who easily overcame a relatively weak Schalke team last season.

For the Premier League, that is a worrying statistic. We can now conclude that the era of English dominance is definitively over.

It is Spain, not Britannia, that rules continental waters. The twin totems of the Spanish league, Barcelona and Real Madrid, are locked in a local battle for European bragging rights.

Only the most one-eyed United follower would argue that the two best teams in last season’s competition were not Real and Barca.

Jose Mourinho’s team have moved to another level, sauntering through this season’s competition and breaking records along the way. Their Catalan nemesis, who maintain a deep-seated psychological hold over Real, provide the biggest obstacle, perhaps the only one, to a third Champions League crown with a third different club for Mourinho.

While England’s finest complain quite logically that Barca and Real benefit unfairly from the individual sale of La Liga TV rights, that does not explain how the Premier League appears to have fallen behind the two other elite European leagues, Serie A and the Bundesliga.

Like England and Germany’s top tiers, Italy returned to collective selling of TV rights last season although its system is more complex and of greater benefit to the big hitters than its two northern European rivals.

Yet the romantic rebirth of Napoli, equivalent to, say, Aston Villa cutting a swathe across European football’s greatest frontiers, demonstrates what can be achieved with the right coaching, recruitment and development of players and a playing style.

The Premier League is in danger of falling behind, not only Spain but Italy and Germany too. This is not necessarily an issue for the national team. That is a different problem altogether. Of the 55 players who played some part in Milan and Naples, only seven were English (Theo Walcott, Kieran Gibbs, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, Gary Cahill, Daniel Sturridge, Ashley Cole and Frank Lampard).

Yet there are plenty of independent observers who believe that standards have dropped in the English game over the last two or three years. Even many United fans recognise that last season’s triumph was the least convincing of Sir Alex Ferguson’s 12 league titles and owed more to grizzled competitiveness than all-round brilliance.

The jury remains out on what their Manchester neighbours, awash with Arab cash, can achieve, certainly at the elite level of club football. Chelsea and Arsenal are undoubtedly in decline. Liverpool are making slow progress while Tottenham, for all the fun and spectacle they have provided in the last three seasons, could quickly go downhill if they lose two or three of their outstanding players.

Success on the main stage tends to come in cycles, yes, but given the resources at its disposal, another night of European pain proves English football has no reason to be pleased with itself.