There can be no doubt, as Liverpool home in on a possible first title in 24 years, that their chances have been enhanced by non-involvement in Europe.

Managers in the know such as José Mourinho and Manuel Pellegrini have been saying all season that it is easier to play once a week, it is clearly less tiring not to have to travel abroad in midweek and you do not run the risk of "hangovers" when disappointing results in Europe affect your confidence in Premier League matches.

To win the league Liverpool need to bolt on four more wins to their already impressive sequence of 10 in a row and, when Chelsea come calling a week on Sunday in what appears to be the most difficult of their remaining fixtures, the difference in the positions of the two clubs will be obvious.

The Anfield game falls right between the two legs of Chelsea's Champions League semi-final against Atlético Madrid. Mourinho's players will arrive in Liverpool having played in Spain, and have the home leg at Stamford Bridge three days after Anfield. Given that victory over Liverpool will not necessarily confirm Chelsea as English champions – another slip-up by Manchester City will be required for that to happen – it may be the case that European progress is prioritised.

To paraphrase Steven Gerrard, the penultimate home game of the season may be the biggest cup final Anfield has seen in decades for Liverpool, but it may not be for Chelsea. That is the advantage of not being involved in Europe.

Having said all that, the way some people have been carrying on you would think Liverpool were at an unfair advantage. Check the comments on these sport blogs over the past couple of weeks and there are suggestions, presumably coming from Manchester, that going for the title while not competing in Europe is tantamount to cheating.

At the very least some seem to feel that if a 24-year gap is closed and Gerrard gets his title wish, an asterisk should accompany the achievement in the record books to denote that Liverpool played fewer games than most of their rivals that season. If Liverpool do win the title and seventh place is established as the ideal launchpad for domestic success, can we expect teams to be fighting to finish outside the European positions from next season onwards? It could be Manchester United have been ahead of the game all along.

There may be a certain amount of sour grapes at play here, but what happened to romance in football? To win the title from seventh, if that is what Liverpool end up doing, ought to be welcomed as a remarkable feat regardless of the number of games played. Having the same Champions League teams sharing the prize between them every year is boring, or so everyone used to say.

The salient point, surely, is that in the Premier League all clubs play the same number of matches, and the English league is notoriously hard to win. Chelsea would be top by now but for losing at Crystal Palace, while Manchester City might still be favourites had they not lost three points at Sunderland. The other major leagues around Europe tend not to throw up results like that when prizes are still at stake and one could not help but feel Gerrard was talking a lot of sense when he built up the forthcoming trip to Norwich City as the biggest must-win game since Istanbul in 2005, whether or not Luis Suárez has a habit of running riot against the Canaries. Liverpool themselves were soundly beaten by Hull City on 1 December and could manage only a draw at West Bromwich Albion two months later, so it would be unwise to take anything for granted against a Norwich side with a new manager and in desperate need of points.

Since the turn of the millennium just four teams have won the Premier League, and Manchester City only arrived late to the party after spending an improbable amount of money. City, it has just been revealed, pay the highest wages in the entire world of sport, not only outspending Spain's big two in football but the American giants of baseball and basketball.

That consideration alone forms a background against which Liverpool's rise can be viewed positively, even if the Anfield wage bill is not exactly insignificant and will doubtless increase when Champions League football is secured.

The reason every single title since the top four came about has gone to a member of that privileged coterie is that the Champions League skews the priorities in domestic leagues. It pays massive amounts of money, which enables competing clubs to bulk out their squads and buy up the best players, who naturally gravitate towards teams who can offer a higher level of competition, all of which leaves the rest of the league with little to aim for except avoiding relegation.

Back in the days when the European Cup was for champions only, it used to be regarded as the icing on the cake for successful clubs. Now it is the bread of life, the whole loaf, and those outside the top four or five are forced to live on crumbs. Liverpool winning the title could be regarded as a breath of fresh air, a throwback to a more democratic past, were it not for the fact that the club's main aim this season has been to reclaim membership of the Champions League gang.

No one could possibly blame them for that, there is a de facto super league in Europe which it is the duty of every leading club to try to join, yet the perverse idea that only members of the Champions League elite can be regarded as worthy English champions just shows how completely Uefa's takeover by stealth has corrupted the sovereignty of individual leagues.

Still, there is always the FA Cup for romance. It seemed reasonable to assume that Wigan's tiredness during extra time in their Wembley semi-final had something to do with the long Championship season plus Europa League involvement at the start of the campaign, so it got a mention in my match report. A reader responded to say that Wigan had played 52 matches to date, so probably were tired, but that Arsenal had played 49, the vast majority of which were against Premier League or Champions League teams. In other words the fatigue was more or less the same for both sides, but Wigan were at an advantage through slumming it in the Championship and spending their season playing lesser opponents.

There is plenty of room for argument about whether a Championship season is actually easier or less taxing than a Premier League one, but missing from my correspondent's analysis of the Wembley situation was the consideration that Arsenal, of the Champions League, were nine minutes from being humbled by Wigan, of the Championship. A team that though relegated at the end of last season had gone to Manchester City in the previous round and put out a side that at the time were favourites to win the Premier League title. You can produce statistics to support almost any argument in football, but Danny Blanchflower was right about the game being about glory. If you don't see that, if you can't even be a little bit excited about teams upsetting the odds, you might be missing the point.