Which soccer leagues will be the biggest in the future?

As far as China is concerned I honestly think that Corruption is holding the sport back

As for the discussion about China, one should also factor in the popularity of basketball in that country. It is at least as popular as soccer and the Chinese are huge NBA fans. Not just because of Yao Ming, Kobe Byrant is probably the most popular foreign athlete in China. Of course, one can be a fan of basketball and soccer at the same time, but I see these two sports competing for consumer spending at least in the near term. It's possible to have multiple sports co-exist, but it's a bit harder to grow them into top leagues at the same time.

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China team will be a very potential team

Still EPL, forever EPL.

Right now the EPL rules and I think it will continue. While the Bundesliga is maybe the best run league in the world. I think league Like Serie A , and Ligue 1 get a bad rap for whatever reason , some of the matches I have seen in in both leAGUES HAVE BEEN great . I think the best league we will see for growth will MLS, Brazil, China, and Japan.

Correct! No players dream of playing in the Asian Champions League much less living in China . The Chinese league's max potential is a decent "retirement" league where big name players may opt for to cash-in once they hit their mid-thirties. That's IF it gets cleaned up from corruption which I don't see happening soon.

Sad as it is, if China gets in a position to offer players more money than the top European club, there's no doubt agents will be persuading them that a move China is the best thing for their career, and players will be speaking at press confences about they'd have never left their country for any club other than Guangzhou Evergrande.

With Barrios, his decison was: to a) to have you and your family to just "get-by" in Europe or South America or b) have you and your family live in luxury forever by playing a few years in China. It'll be a bit harder to drag top stars from Europe as they already have more money than they know what to do with and they know that the China option will still be there when they are 35.

The option to go to the middle-east or China for more money already exists yet few are going. What's going to be so different in the future?

China, with its rising economy and status in the world, is increaasingly becoming a destination for many people to immigrate in search of better quality of life. It's also a nation with a great history and culture, you make it sound like it's some backwater in the middle of nowhere. As more Latin Americans immigrate, more players from South and Central America will head over that way - similar to what happen with Germany and the Bundesliga in the mid-nineties.

Having said that. for the league to become top-notch it absolutely needs to have great homegrown players, not sure if China can deliver on that over the next twenty years.

In the football-world it is. And it always will be. No Chinese team will ever qualify for the UEFA Champions League because it's in the middle of nowhere. And with its corruption and lack of homegrown talent, China is to the football world what Somalia is to the real world.

The Chinese league is not emerging. I don't even know if MLS has come far enough to call it emerging, but its well ahead of China. China is more like an LDC.

No South American team will ever qualify for the UEFA CL either. Does that make the Argentine and Brazilian leagues a backwater? Also, I think you miss the point of the question: it's not whether currently another league can challenge the top western European ones, but whether in the future other leagues may take some of the hegemony away? The shifting economic and political landscape worldwide may lead to changes in other areas, such as football.

Well, they too are hurt by their location but they're not "backwater" leagues because they at least produce tonnes of local talent, which China won't be able to come anywhere near accomplishing in our lifetimes (sorry, China but its true).

I get the question. I know we are talking about the future. But if new leagues are going to be big in the future, I'm going to put my bet on those new leagues to be the ones that are already showing strong signs of emerging. Not the ones that are truly crap leagues at the moment.

Football in the future will be all about money. the big leagues in europe won't be bad. the EPL and spanish league will still be top in the world, maybe next tier will be France, italy, and germany, maybe portugal. Russia has lot's of money right now so i could see them joining the top tier. Brazil will get better as it's clubs get richer. the MLS will become one of the top leagues, the Indian leage and china will do well also.

Football in the future will be all about money? Which makes me wonder what it's all about now. Don't see how you suddenly put India into that prospective. They put bugga all into football now, so why would that suddenly change? Go HAL!, Go Air India!! Go Chirag!! That's what Indian football is up against. Companies, not sports teams.