Premier League clubs dominate Europe, so why don't they actually win?
Year after year the late rounds of Europe's top two competitions are filled with English clubs yet they can never seem to win the trophy. Why not?
In the lead-up to Tuesday's UEFA Champions League quarterfinal tie against Bayern Munich, Manchester City center back Ruben Dias was asked the following question:
There’s a theory that because the Bundesliga is not at the same level (really) as the Premier League that this should be a game that you win with a little bit to spare maybe, do you agree with that?
It should come as no surprise, this question made people mad, especially Bundesliga fans.
Especially Bundesliga fans.
Hindsight is 20/20, and City's relatively easy 3-0 win may even have validated the journalist's assumption but here’s the thing, this journalist was right even before that match kicked off.
The Premier League is leaps and bounds the best league in Europe. There’s no question about that. It has the best teams, the best coaches, and (for the most part) the best players.
The best way to measure this of course is money. The Premier League has the most money so they can afford to pay the highest wages. That attracts the best players and coaches. Players are leaving Champions League level clubs in other countries to join bottom of the table Premier League sides because they could pay them more. Three time Europa League winner Unai Emery is managing Aston Villa and we’re only two years removed from Champions League winner Carlo Ancelotti managing Everton!
Nobody has the pull that Premier League has. It’s the toughest league in the world.
Of course, no one wants to judge things based on money. They want to settle things on the pitch. Naturally that leads to using Champions League wins as a metric for judging the quality of entire leagues and seeing which one is better.
If the logic of the previous sentence seems off to you it should. It doesn’t make any sense. We can’t judge the quality of an entire league based on one team’s performance. If PSG were to win the Champions League, no one would be saying Ligue 1 is the best league in Europe.
Now let’s take it a step further. This logic doesn’t work for determining the best team either.
For starters, we know the best team doesn’t always win the Champions League. That’s the nature of cup football. If the best team always won the cup the FA Cup would always be won by the Premier League champion and if the Champions League winner is the best team in Europe then by default they’d have won their domestic league too.
That obviously doesn’t happen. There’s variance, randomness, and a whole lot of luck1 involved. The Champions League knockout rounds being played over two legs reduces that variance ever so slightly but weird things can still happen. As for the final, anything can happen in a one off match.
A one-off match - that sometimes ends with the essential lottery of penalty kicks - cannot determine the best team in the competition, but we can’t even say that the final is comprised of the two best teams Europe. Often it isn’t and that’s thanks to how the competition is structured, the draw. Once you hit the quarterfinal round, there are no rules as to who can be drawn against whom.
If we wanted to judge the quality of leagues using European competition, ultimately the best place to look is at the clubs who make the semifinals. Sometimes the two best teams are drawn against each other in the semifinals. Rarely are the two best teams drawn against each other in the quarterfinal but it's not so rare that two of the four best teams are drawn against each other in that round. There are years where things get wonky and upsets happen but generally speaking the semifinals will feature at least three if not all four of the best teams in Europe.
And when we start looking at the clubs comprising the semifinals of European competition it’s clear: Over the last two decades no country has dominated Europe like England has2.
The aftermath of the Heysel Disaster saw English clubs barred from European competition for five years. That isolated the English clubs in more ways than one, but a big one was falling behind the rest of the continent tactically.
English clubs were allowed back by the time the European Cup became the Champions League in 1992 but they still had some catching up to do. It took two seasons and the group stage moving from eight to 16 teams before an English club made the group stage. It took another two years before an English club made it out of the group stage.
Manchester United famously won the competition in 1999 but it still took another five-ish years (and some tournament expansion) for the rest of the English clubs to really establish themselves. z
In 2003-04 the knockout round expanded from eight to 16 teams and within a year the English clubs found their foothold and established themselves. Since then, other than a four year transitional period they’ve never really gone away.
From 2005-2011 English clubs comprised 12 of the 28 (42.86%) semifinal teams in the competition. The next closest league was Spain with seven, but by Spain we really mean Barcelona who were responsible for five of those seven appearances. In that time period English clubs accounted for half the teams to make it to the final and had an unprecedented three consecutive years of having three teams in the semifinals. Only once during those seven seasons did England not have a club reach the semifinals.
England’s dominance started to wain at the turn of the decade. Manchester United reached a final in 2011 and Chelsea won it in 2012 but the Premier League was going through a transitional period and frankly wasn’t that good.
The dominance now shifted to Spain but was La Liga the best league in the world? That’s a different question. This is when the Champions League moved into their super team era.
Over the next four seasons, Spain and Germany lead the way with eight and five semifinal teams respectively. Not so fast though. Once again Spain’s ‘dominance’ is dominated by two clubs, Barcelona and Real Madrid who accounted for seven of the eight semifinalists. Bayern Munich accounted for four of Germany’s five. In fact, Barcelona, Real, and Bayern accounted for 11 of the 16 semifinal spots.
Does that mean their leagues were the best? Hardly. These were just really good teams. Barcelona was built with the spine of a Spanish side that won three consecutive international tournaments. Bayern had the spine of Germany’s 2014 World Cup winners, and Real Madrid had just about every other major player the era’s international tournaments.
Oh right, on top of that these teams had Lionel Messi, Robert Lewandowski, and Cristiano Ronaldo IN THEIR PRIMES. Take those three guys out and these are still probably the best three teams in the world3, but adding the three best players in the world on top of that makes them unbeatable.
Regardless of the quality of leagues, no one was competing with those teams in that era. From 2011-2018 those three won every Champions League except for one where Bayern lost on penalties.
By 2016 though the landscape was changing. Pep Guardiola, Jose Mourinho, and Jurgen Klopp were all now managing in the Premier League. English football was ready to take back Europe, only this time they weren’t just coming for the Champions League, they had their sights set on Europe’s second tier tournament too.
From 2016 until now (7 seasons) English clubs have sent eight teams to the Champions League semifinal, only one fewer than Spain (Real Madrid makes up five of those nine) and lead the way with six finalists. In the Europa League no one had more semifinalists than England’s nine with five going to the final. In the last four years there have been three all English finals between the two competitions.
There was only one season where England didn’t have a semifinalist in either competition. That was 2020 - the year the knockout rounds were played as single leg knockout tournament in August. That’s a fundamentally different game then what the competition usually is. For that reason we can strike it from the record.
Here’s the problem though. The English clubs don’t win. Since 2016 Manchester United (in the Europa League) were the only English team to win a competition having played a non-English opponent in the final.
If we go all the way back to 2004 the record doesn’t get much better. Four of England’s eight European triumphs came in all English finals. England’s record in finals against foreign opposition: 13 matches, four wins, nine losses.
The question is - why does this keep happening? Why can’t English teams finish the job?
The simple answer is because the Premier League is too good.
Top to bottom no league runs as deep as the Premier League. There are no easy games, no weeks off. It’s a grueling grueling slog that wears you down by the time you reach the final month.
The Premier League is essentially the worst league to produce European success. On the other end of the spectrum, one team leagues like the Bundesliga and Ligue 1 are not exactly conducive to European success either.
Right in the middle of those two extremes is La Liga. It’s a league with good teams at the top but nowhere near the same quality in the bottom half of the table, which creates the perfect environment for clubs to do well in Europe.
The best way to illustrate this point is to go back to the super team era of the Champions League - the era that was dominated by Real Madrid, Barcelona, and Bayern Munich.
At the time Bayern were managed by Pep Guardiola and were not only winning the Bundesliga, they were doing so in record setting fashion. Each season they were wrapping up the Bundesliga title in April allowing them to devote their sole focus on the Champions League.
The conventional wisdom was that this gave Bayern an advantage. With their league matches now meaningless, they could rest their best players at the weekend so everyone would be fresh for the midweek European matches.
But conventional wisdom was forgetting an important thing. When it comes to athletes performing at peak levels, it’s not just about being in top physical shape. There’s a mental aspect too. With Bayern playing effectively meaningless matches domestically, players are simply going through the motions hoping not to get hurt. If a player is being rested, he didn’t have to worry about coming on to make an impact late in the game.
When there’s no consequence to losing a match, that mental switch in your head gets turned to off. It’s very difficult for athletes to toggle between that on/off switch. Once it gets switched to off, it takes a second to get it back on.
Bayern greatly struggled with this. In a period where they were dominating the Bundesliga they got destroyed 5-0 on aggregate(including a 4-0 loss at home) to Real Madrid followed by a 5-3 aggregate loss to Barcelona. A year later it wasn't even a super team that got them, falling 2-1 to Atletico Madrid4.
When viewing it from this prism, Bayern’s successful European campaigns look like benefitting from circumstances
. In 2013 Bayern squeaked by a Real Madrid team that was falling out with Jose Mourinho, and then faced a German opponent in the final.
As mentioned before, 2020 was the season the competition was played as a single tie knockout tournament. Bayern wrapped up the domestic title shortly after the restart, allowing them to rest their players for a bit, before slowly ramping them back up at the end of the season - sort of using the end of the season as a de-facto Champions League preseason. Then in August, their sole focus was on Europe. They didn’t have to worry about toggling that switch between on and off.
It’s not a coincidence that 2020 is also the only season PSG - another “super” team from a one-team league - made the final5. They too benefitted from getting to exclusively focus on the Champions League in August.
The key for Real Madrid and Barcelona was they had each other. Year after year the two6 pushed each other until the final days of the season. Every match was a must win game BUT not every match was a tough game.
The (lack of) quality of the bottom of the league meant that down the stretch these teams had the opportunity to rest 2-3 different players a week to make sure they wouldn’t wear down. That greatly helped with the physical workload but the mental switch never moved to off. They still needed to win these games. If you were being “rested” you still had to be ready for the possibility that you’d have to come on for 30 minutes to try to win the game. The stakes were still there.
The setup in La Liga is perfect. The top teams have about four big “derbies” a season7, about 6-8 tough matches against the teams a run down, and a whole lot of cakewalks. Bayern doesn't get that in Germany8, at most they get two matches against Borussia Dortmund but even those are one sided affairs.
As for the Premier League, they’re on the complete opposite of the spectrum. You have 10 matches against the other “top six” sides and two more against whichever club is trying to crash the party this year9. The next level down is, there isn't really one. There are no cakewalks in the Premier League. You can't show up to Bournemouth and just expect to win. You have to earn it.
That kind of pressure makes it all the more difficult. Unless you’re Manchester City, you don’t have the squad depth to just randomly rest some of your best players and still expect to get the job done. The top players are grinding week after week after week.
That’s reflected in their European success. In 2017 Manchester United essentially started punting away the league in February, putting all their eggs in the Europa League basket. Chelsea’s Champions League success came in a season where they barely squeaked out a fourth place finish. City did run away with the league, but got off to a slow start that season and became a machine in the second half. When they booked their trip to the final they had won 33 of their last 36 games. There was no off switch. Tottenham’s appearance in the final came in a season where they almost allowed a top four finish to slip away. They lost five of their last eight matches (all comps) heading into the final and only won three of their last 12 league matches once the knockout rounds started.
All this makes Liverpool managing to reach finals on the back of 97 and 92 point seasons all the more impressive. It’s just not done in the Premier League. In one of those finals, they faced an English team and won easily. In the other, they lost to an inferior Real Madrid team. Real let Liverpool have all the ball that match, scoring on a counter attack, Liverpool just couldn’t hit the next level of energy required to break Real down.
You can count trophies all you want, but one team winning a trophy does not speak for an entire league. Year after year English teams in all levels of Europe10 consistently take care of business as they draw good but inferior teams all the way to the semifinals.
By the final month of the season the mental and physical toll of the Premier League is too much to overcome. Meanwhile the mentally sharp but physically rested Spanish teams are ready to pounce.
That luck can come in a whole lot of ways whether it’s on the pitch like your opponent missing a sitter or off the pitch, like someone else knocking out the most difficult team in your path, getting a favorable draw, your opponents star player has an untimely injury, or a volcano in Iceland forcing your Spanish opponent to have to take an 18 hour bus journey to get to the match
You’re all going to say Spain and hold your horses, we’ll get to that.
Here’s your argument for that. Barcelona’s spine started fading out leaving Messi to try and keep everything together on his own. He couldn’t. Meanwhile Real Madrid sold Ronaldo but kept everyone else and kept winning.
Followed by a 6-3 loss to Real Madrid, but bad cup luck made that a quarterfinal tie. A year later they won the Bundesliga by 21 points but again were knocked out in the semifinal by Real Madrid
2020 also had two French teams reach the semifinals. That’s the same number of semifinalists France had had in the previous 16 years. I told you, 2020 is a complete outlier.
and sometimes Atletico Madrid
Plus a few more in the cups
Their struggles this year have been of their own making
Previously Leicester, now Newcastle
West Ham went to the semifinals of the Europa League last year, were the better side over two legs, and were unlucky not to reach the final.
Brutal cope
Bundesliga ❤️