Bill Connelly Apr 23, 2026, 10:26 AM ET Close Bill Connelly is a writer for ESPN. He covers college football, soccer and tennis. He has been at ESPN since 2019. One of the major storylines of the 2025-26 European soccer campaign has been how the best league in the world, the Premier League , has a bit of a boringness problem . Open-play scoring is down -- hell, the amount of time the ball is in play is down -- and has been replaced by meat walls , long throw-ins and all sorts of functional, but aesthetically unpleasant, actions. So does that mean soccer as a whole is going through a more stolid, cruddy-to-watch period? Hell no! It just means you just have to watch other leagues!…