There may be a gulf in stature, profile and salaries but the Socceroos believe the gap in technical standard with the best from the English Premier League is increasingly negligible.

The Socceroos returned to Australia from their 2-1 friendly defeat against the Three Lions with the knowledge they can compete with the best from Europe, even if playing their club football in the A-League.

There was a surreal feeling for some of the Socceroos as they lined up against stars of the game at Sunderland's Stadium of Light, but midfielder Aaron Mooy said any sense of being overawed didn't transpire on the field. The players were of a better quality and better drilled, but the Melbourne City star said he was surprised the pace and standard of the game wasn't much greater than the A-League.

"I don't think it's that much different," Mooy said. "Everyone talks about it being so different but I don't think it's that much quicker. They're probably better players on the ball, they're probably physically better as well but I didn't really think it was that much quicker than the A-League."

But convincing the Australian public of that may prove harder after coach Ange Postecoglou hit out at the cultural critique that hangs over the domestic game.

"I think the three best midfielders on the park were Mile Jedinak, Tomi Rogic and Aaron Mooy. Just because people play at a certain league and have a higher profile that doesn't mean they're at a different level to what we've got," Postecoglou said.

"It won't happen if we don't change perception and if we don't have a different perception of ourselves.

"The English are pumping up Marcus Rashford on the back of a deflection and a decent volley and after that he didn't really do much. But, he's 18, he plays for Manchester United and he's got a big fat contract and I'm sure that he gets elevated to a different level now because of doing that. We somehow think that Aaron Mooy or Tomi Rogic is less worthy of that sort of merit," Postecoglou said.

Australia continue their run of friendlies against European opponents with the first match of their two-game series against Greece on Saturday night at ANZ Stadium.

"The more games we get against this level and play our kind of football, it hopefully changes perceptions externally," Postecoglou said.

"I don't have that issue about us having to prove ourselves or our players having to prove ourselves, what we need to do is feel better about ourselves and have more belief and hopefully the perception on the outside changes."

Postecoglou confirmed his intentions to continue to experiment with the team in the series against Greece, including making several changes to the starting line-up for the second match.  "We'll make a number of changes for the second game, it was the nature of the exercise anyway,"  he said.

There's a chance he will change his formation from the diamond 4-4-2 he used against England, with the inclusion of four more forwards in the squad to play Greece.

"I think we're obviously going to have a set way and a set philosophy that I don't veer away from. As you saw with the England game, we were lacking in the front half without Appo Giannou, Timmy Cahill and obviously Matt Leckie not being there, [Nathan Burns] not being there and Tomi Juric and Jamie Maclaren came in having hardly played any football so we had to tweak the formation," Postecoglou said.