Eight-nil to Chelsea, four-nil to Manchester United: the squabbling monarchs of English football decided their argument and closed the league season with a veritable riot of goals and entertainment. The millions of viewers from Anchorage to Auckland who provide the Premier League with a king's ransom from broadcasting rights must have been ecstatic.

When asked on Sunday night if he had just won the best league in the world, Carlo Ancelotti provided a careful response that satisfied the questioner without saying anything potentially dangerous if placed before a more rigorous court of inquiry. "I think so," he said. "The difference is the atmosphere in the stadium, the culture of these people for the sport. This is the best football in the world, for this."

For this, yes. But for the football? A harsher judge would say that Ancelotti's Chelsea had just won the title by a margin of only a single point over a team whose potency was considerably reduced by the departure of Cristiano Ronaldo. Whatever morale-boosting claims Sir Alex Ferguson may have made about his squad, United contrived to lose seven games during the season, their highest for six years.

So was it just United who were worse, or did Chelsea improve? The west London side ended up with 103 goals, a significant improvement over the 72 they scored in each of their two victorious seasons under José Mourinho. But they also lost six times during the campaign, whereas in 2004‑05, winning the title for the first time under the Portuguese coach, they were defeated only once.

The unusual frequency with which big clubs were beaten, often by unfancied opponents, was a feature of a season in which Arsenal lost nine matches, fourth-placed Tottenham 10, and Liverpool 11. Friends of mine in Sweden, Australia and the United States, all of them experienced and knowledgeable football watchers, are unanimous in their belief that unpredictability is one of the Premier League's most attractive features, certainly by comparison with the Spanish and Italian leagues. When they tune in to an English match, they say, they know they are going to get a real contest, and this season was certainly closer in that respect to the relatively even competitiveness of the old First Division.

But an underlying cause of the season's string of upsets was surely the epidemic of injuries that destabilised the defences of all the significant challengers. Chelsea lost José Bosingwa, Ricardo Carvalho and Ashley Cole for long periods, and had to cope with a distracted John Terry. For United, Rio Ferdinand played only 13 Premier League games, four players have been used at right-back, and Michael Carrick and Darren Fletcher found themselves bizarrely paired in the centre of the defence for a couple of games. Arsenal were without Gaël Clichy in mid-season and lost William Gallas in February. And Liverpool's back-four ended the season resembling a game of musical chairs.

Such a rate of attrition may go some way to explaining the fact that when Diniyar Bilyaletdinov scored Everton's winner in the 94th minute on Sunday, he was registering the 1,053th goal of the Premier League season, the highest total for 10 years. The equivalent figures in Italy and Spain, with one match to go in Serie A and La Liga, are 968 and 1,002 respectively. In crude statistical terms England offers the most bangs per buck.

At the moment the Premier League seems to be surviving the loss – thanks to a weak pound and changes in the tax rate – of its status as the favoured destination of the world's top players, and those friends of mine in other countries still share a taste for the non-stop effort and the colourful dramatis personae of England's top tier. By my reckoning, however, any manager of a leading team who can assemble an outstanding back four and keep them all fit throughout next season, in the manner of Parker, Pallister, Bruce and Irwin for Ferguson's first great United side, or Dixon, Adams, Bould and Winterburn for George Graham's Arsenal, will be on to a winner.

Contrasting fortunes created illusion of speed

Clever old Michael Schumacher, who knows that one way of making yourself look faster is to get your team-mate to go slower. Until last weekend Nico Rosberg had never qualified lower than sixth or finished lower than fifth this season, while Schumacher's best grid position was seventh and his best finish sixth, prompting a great deal of urgent redesign work at the Mercedes factory. Perhaps it was just a coincidence that while Schumacher showed a slight improvement in Barcelona, qualifying sixth and finishing fourth, Rosberg qualified eighth and finished 13th, his worst placings of the season.

A sense of history left Wiggins tickled by pink

Just occasionally the suffocating effect of commerce is set aside and we are reminded that today's over-rewarded champions started out with the same dreams and ideals as the rest of us. "I know a lot about the history of cycling," Bradley Wiggins said on Saturday night, speaking of his pride in donning the maglia rosa, the leader's jersey, after the first stage of the Giro d'Italia. "To wear the pink jersey is special. I grew up watching videos of the Giro, seeing [Maurizio] Fondriest and [Gianni] Bugno wear it. I realise what I have on my shoulders. It will hang on the wall for the rest of my life." He lost it on stage two, the victim of a mass wipe-out, but not before the Gazzetta dello Sport had called him "a winner on the bike and in words".

Many a Wembley slip twixt World Cup and England

There are some big games coming up at Wembley in the next couple of weeks, and the evidence from Saturday's FA Trophy final shows that the pitch, although newly relaid for the umpteenth time, is still nowhere near fit for purpose. The short-term answer: play the FA Cup final and England's warm-up match against Mexico a few miles away at the Emirates, where the groundsmen seem to have no trouble producing a flawless surface. The FA has a duty of care, and Wembley's loose turf exposes players to the risk of unnecessary injury. If I were Sepp Blatter, I would not be confident that the governing body of the English game, having spent three years failing to eradicate a fundamental problem that was obvious from the outset, will have found a solution by 2018.