Arsenal's impressive 2-0 victory in Munich came too late to rescue the Gunners who went out on away goals after a 3-1 defeat in the home leg, leaving them on this season's Champions League scrapheap along with Manchester United, last year's winners Chelsea and Manchester City.
The Premier League hierachy will no doubt insist it is a blip and not a clear sign of a decline in quality in the richest league in the world, but Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger admitted it was a wake-up call.
"It's a massive disappointment for English football," the Frenchman said in the aftermath of Arsenal's brave, but ultimately doomed, fightback in Bavaria.
"We accept the rest of European football has caught us."
"We had Manchester City and United, Chelsea and Arsenal all out by the quarter-final.
"It's a long time since that happened. We have to take that into consideration in the way we think about the future of the Premier League."
England currently top UEFA's club coefficient ranking which determine the number of entries each country has in the competition and a UEFA spokesman told Reuters on Thursday it would be "many years" before there was any chance of England's entries being reduced from the current allocation.
"There would have to be a sustained lack of success and even then it would take many years before England's number was reduced," UEFA said.
Bayern coach Jupp Heynckes played down the significance of this season's Premier League failure.
"I think comparisons like this don't bring much," he said Heynckes. "We have had German teams knocked out early in previous years.
"Arsenal sh
