English has like 17 tenses, many languages only have 3 without any loss in expressivity. When learning English you need to learn each word twice (once to write, once to speak) - that's not the case with many phonetic languages.

English isn't inherently better as a world's language than anything else, it's just there, so it benefits from the network effect (it's more beneficial to learn language that has the most users, so it gets even more users).