-
Ryan O’Hanlon
multiple authors
Everyone made fun of him at the time, but Arsene Wenger had a point.
After this in 2012 armory lost to Sunderland in the FA Cup and when they lost 4–0 AC Milan Ahead of the second leg of their Champions League round-of-16 tie, Wenger strengthened his team’s focus for the remainder of the season. “The first trophy is to finish in the top four,” he said.
Although this lack of ambition seemed to some as if it was the cause of Arsenal’s seven-year trophy drought, this was simply not true. The construction costs of Arsenal’s new stadium had constrained their ability to spend Manchester United, Manchester City And chelsea – Wenger was only referring to the economic reality he was living in.
To compete with those teams in the future, the Gunners needed to secure the additional millions of dollars in revenue generated from qualifying. uefa champions league by finishing in the top four of Premier League.
Although you don’t get any silverware for finishing in the top four, finishing there has a greater chance of winning the Premier League or Champions League titles than winning the FA Cup or League Cup. And if finishing in the top four is more important than the two competitions for which they hand out trophies, then it’s kind of Is Its own trophy.
It’s not that we don’t treat it that way – the top-four race is one of the three ways we structure each season, along with the title race and the relegation battle. (I don’t think this was intentional, but I do appreciate our collective consideration for not settling on “race” to describe competition between teams that are trying to avoid something rather than achieve something.)
also with Extra guarantee of fifth Champions League place For the Premier League, this season has been no different. From here, Manchester United, Aston Villa, Liverpool and Chelsea will be assessed primarily by whether they secure one of the five spots. Liverpool manager Arne Slott as put it back in february: “If we don’t have Champions League football, it’s certainly not an acceptable season. …It has a huge impact on the way this club is run.”
The impact on revenue is massive, but in a world of fixture bloat and player burnout, could there be a hidden benefit to missing out on the world’s most prestigious competition for a season? After all, two of the current top four teams, Man United and Aston Villa, are not playing in the Champions League this year.
Maybe missing out on the Champions League isn’t such a bad thing for Premier League teams?
• Premier League without set-piece goals: what would the table look like?
• Tracker: Champions League qualification, Premier League relegation
• 2026 World Cup team rankings: All 48 national teams
Economic impact of missing the Champions League
let’s take liverpool For example.
After almost winning the quadruple in the 2021-22 season, everything fell apart the following year. Jürgen Klopp’s team finished fifth – the first and only time in his eight full seasons at the club that they failed to qualify for the Champions League.
The effect here is very straightforward. Kieron O’Connor’s excellent stats Swiss RambleHere is the club’s broadcast revenue from European competition across all of Klopp’s full seasons at the club:
• 2016-17: None
• 2017-18: €81 million
• 2018-19: €111 million
• 2019-20: €80 million
• 2020-21: €88 million
• 2021-22: €120 million
• 2022-23: €84 million
• 2023-24: €27 million
In 2016–17, Liverpool were not in European competition at all, and in 2023–24, they were in the Europa League. As Slott said in February: “When I got here and just signed Federico Chiesa“It was after the Europa League season.”
It’s true, and less revenue means less money spent on improving the team. But interestingly, Slott is suggesting that the financial impact of missing out on the Champions League actually comes a year later. The transfer expenditure at the club also shows as much.
The €12 million deal for Chiesa was Liverpool’s only permanent move in the summer of 2024. But after a disappointing 2022-23 campaign, Liverpool spent a combined €172 million (per Transfermarkt) on acquisitions. Dominic Szoboszlai, alexis mac allister, Ryan Gravenberch And Wataru Endo Before the season without Champions League matches.
Don’t forget: They also agreed a nine-figure, Premier League-record deal with Brighton Moises CaicedoWho instead decided to join Chelsea – another club that failed to qualify for the Champions League after four consecutive top-four finishes.
Now, I’m not entirely convinced that Liverpool cut their spending in 2024 solely because of the lack of Champions League revenue from last season. They also signed the current backup goalkeeper Giorgi Mamardashvili From Valencia For the deal to be made permanent next season. they agreed to sign Martin Zubimendi From real sociedad Too, only for him to make a last-second U-turn and stay in Spain for another season before joining Arsenal last summer. Additionally, they also had to sort out the contract situations for three of their best and most expensive players: mohammed salah, virgil van dijk And Trent Alexander-Arnold.
Unlike 2012, when clubs like Arsenal were competing financially with the top four teams in Europe’s other major leagues and the extra European revenue could mean you would sign someone who would otherwise have gone to AC Milan, the biggest Premier League clubs are now only really competing. real Madrid, Bayern Munich, barcelona And Paris Saint Germain For talent. The rest of the Premier League is now competing with the top four teams from all of Europe’s major leagues.
The combined commercial and broadcast revenue generated by the topflight in England means that losing Champions League revenue is, on average, not as painful as it used to be. In 2022–23, Liverpool and Chelsea ranked seventh and ninth respectively in global revenue among all clubs. In 2023–24, they finished eighth and 10th, with no club in the Champions League.
Potential benefit of not winning the Champions League
In 2016–17, when Liverpool reached the top four after finishing eighth and Chelsea won the Premier League title after finishing 10th the previous season, a new theory emerged: not playing in the Champions League was actually beneficial to your Premier League performance.
To test it, a trained astrophysicist and Harvard professor wrote a blog post Where they looked at the relationship between the season-to-season change in European matches played by a team and the season-to-season change in Premier League points won.
“[For] He wrote, “For every extra game a team plays in Europe, they can expect to lose half a point compared to last season.” Therefore, if a team plays 12 more games, it will lose 6 points. [on average] Compared to last season.”
What’s interesting is that the author was Laurie Shaw, who now has the title of “Chief Scientist”. in liverpool. At the time Shaw wrote the article, several other analyzes had determined that there was no “hangover effect” for teams playing in Europe. In other words, teams that had just played a match in Europe did not perform worse than expected in their next Premier League match. Shaw’s work suggested that additional resources devoted to European matches – energy, strategy, travel, etc. – have a kind of cumulative effect.
Last month, blogger markstats Looked at the past three seasons and found that there is still no obvious hangover effect in the Premier League. Since we can’t ask Shaw to re-run his analysis for every season since 2016-17, I decided to do so – but only with Champions League matches.
When you plot out all pairs of seasons when a team competes in at least one of the Champions League, it looks like this:
while it is not strong relation, this is close to the same relation that Shaw saw in 2016. You can see this in the downward slope of the trendline.
Based on this data: For every additional Champions League game a team plays, they lose, on average, a little more than a third of their points. Therefore, every three extra games in the Champions League is worth approximately one point in the Premier League table. And if we exclude last season, when the total number of Champions League games increased for allSo the numbers match Shaw’s – one point lost for every two additional Champions League games played.
Now, there are a lot of confounding factors here. When some teams miss the Champions League, they are usually somewhat unlucky. The same goes in the other direction: sometimes teams qualify for the Champions League due to unsustainable hot streaks. How much of this is inevitable regression to the mean? And how much of this is actual degradation in performance related to additional intense games on your schedule?
But at least, there is Some? Here. It seems reasonable to expect the best teams to actually play more games in the Champions League, so the fact that teams on average perform better in the Premier League while playing fewer Champions League games suggests to me that the extra toll of additional high-level matches is having a real negative impact.
I also looked at the total number of games played season by season across all competitions, and there is basically no correlation to change in points, which suggests there is something about the Champions League in particular that influences domestic performance.
Of course, it would be absurd to say that it is better not to be in the Champions League. We don’t watch or care about sports because they deliver financial results – finance helps deliver results and preparation By Result. The aim of all this is to try to win things like the Champions League and the Premier League. The way you do that, you know, is actually participating in the Champions League.
But I think we have potentially entered a stage of Premier League development where the teams are so rich, and the competition so tough, that there is a potential for rapid rise in a year for a club that is out of the competition. You’ll still have plenty of money to spend on your roster due to last season’s European revenues, your luck will probably be a little better going forward, and you’ll get a full season without the potentially damaging effects of all those midweek Champions League matches.
For anyone who fails to finish in the top five this season, a return to the Champions League places next year would seem to be a logical option. So, Liverpool or Chelsea fans: there’s something that might help you sleep at night.
