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Ryan O’Hanlon
multiple authors
When uefa champions league Playoff round starts this week, there will be only one Premier League The team is competing. newcastle united Travel to Baku on Wednesday to take on the reigning Azerbaijani champions, qarabag fk.
Reaching the playoff round is a success for almost everyone. defending champions of both Eredivisie And serie a Could not make the playoffs – they were eliminated in the league stage, along with two clubs from La Liga, another Dutch club, a German club and a French club. Both finalists of last year’s Champions League, inter Milan And Paris Saint GermainDid not perform well enough in the league stage to directly reach the Round of 16, so they are in the playoffs, and are also real Madrid, Atletico Madrid, borussia dortmundAnd juventus.
The aim of the league stage is primarily to avoid elimination – unless you play in the Premier League.
armory Finished first in the league stage of the Champions League by winning eight out of eight matches. liverpool stood third, Tottenham Hotspur fourth, chelsea sixth, and Manchester City Eighth. To put it another way, here are the eight clubs that have earned byes into the Round of 16:
• Germany: 1
• Spain: 1
• Portugal: 1
• England: 5
What’s even more shocking: four of the five Premier League teams in the top eight average more points per game in the Champions League than in their domestic league. Liverpool are sixth in England and third in Europe. Tottenham have just fired their manager, they’re five points off the relegation places in England, and they finished fourth in the first stage of the tournament, which theoretically features all the best teams in the world.
It almost feels like the Champions League Easy For English teams compared to the Premier League – and that’s because it is. These are the five main reasons.
– Premier League superlatives: 25 best/worst players across different skills
– Which clubs sign the best players for each position and why?
– The 50 worst Premier League transfers of all time: who is number 1?
1. Premier League teams are richer than most Champions League teams
A few weeks ago, Deloitte released its Money League, which ranks the 30 richest football clubs in the world based on revenue. Here’s how many clubs from each country are on the list:
• Portugal: 1
• France: 1
• Turkey: 2
• Spain: 3
• Italy: 4
• Germany: 4
• England: 15
The Premier League has the richest broadcast deals ever – and it has distributed those revenues more evenly from top to bottom than any other Big Five league in Europe. The result is what you see above.
Now, revenue does not have a one-to-one relationship with success – west ham united For example, money is 20th in the league – but on a broader scale and over a much longer time frame, the richest teams are going to be the best teams for obvious reasons.
2. Premier League teams have more talent than most Champions League teams
Although reliable salary data is difficult to obtain, studies have shown Estimated squad transfer values from Transfermarkt are a very solid proxy for how much a team pays its players. And how much a team pays its players is also a fairly reliable indicator of how talented those players are.
The top 25 teams are as follows estimated market value Distribute in the world’s football leagues:
• France: 1
• Portugal: 2
• Italy: 3
• Spain: 3
• Germany: 3
• England: 13
And as I wrote about last month When trying to explain the parity in the Premier League this season:
“According to analysis by Footy’s John Muller, the Big Six employed 29% of Transfermarkt’s estimated 300 most valuable players in the world during the 2014–15 season, while only 7% were employed by other teams in England and 64% played elsewhere in Europe. Fast forward 10 years, and the Big Six’s share of the world’s best players has remained steady at 29%, but the rest of the Premier League’s hold on top talent has almost tripled: to 18%.“
Most of the world’s best footballers are playing in the Premier League – and a lot of them are not doing Playing in the Champions League.
3. Premier League teams are better than most Champions League teams
club aloe The ratings contain data that goes back to the 1920s, and the system is a simple historical record: two teams play, and rating points are given or subtracted depending on the location of the match and the final score.
The current Elo rankings are pretty close to the Transfermarkt projections – even though the rankings don’t care about how much a team pays its players or how good we think they are. The purely results-based rankings break down the top 25 places by league as follows:
• France: 1
• Portugal: 2
• Spain: 3
• Germany: 3
• Italy: 4
• England: 12
While Elo is a backward-looking model, we can also use the betting markets to see how we can project the team’s strength going forward. There are people whose financial livelihood depends on estimating how good a given soccer team is compared to all other soccer teams and sites pitchrank Cross-referencing the weekly betting odds to tell us what those guys think.
bayer leverkusen The team is the eighth-highest seed among the 16 Champions League playoff clubs – around average. In PitchRank, there are 11 Premier League teams that are rated higher than Leverkusen. if we take benficaThe lowest seeded team remaining in the Champions League, then there are the 16 Premier League sides that are rated higher.
If there were a 36-team competition featuring the world’s best teams, regardless of what league they play in, around half of them could come from the Premier League.
4. Premier League teams get easier schedules than all other Champions League teams
If we use Club Elo ratings as a rough estimate of team strength, here’s how all the Premier League teams fare in the Champions League compared to everyone else:
• Arsenal: First
• Manchester City: 2nd
• Liverpool: 5th
• Chelsea: 8th
• Newcastle: 10th
•Tottenham: 16th
According to UEFA rules, teams from the same country cannot play each other in the league stage of the Champions League. So, for example, Tottenham cannot draw five of the top 10 teams in the tournament. And of course: Opta’s Strength Rating of Schedule Says Spurs had the easiest draw of any team. The same ratings say Liverpool had the fourth easiest schedule, Chelsea had the fifth easiest and Man City had the seventh easiest.
This does not mean that Premier League teams cannot get difficult draws – Arsenal’s difficulty was about average, while Newcastle were among the five most difficult teams – rather it means that, on average, Premier League teams are going to get easier draws than teams from any other major league.
Of course, there is a bit of circular logic going on here in the context of league-strength arguments: Premier League teams get easier schedules! But Premier League teams only have easier schedules because they don’t have to play other Premier League teams!
But that’s why the top-eight numbers look so obvious: Premier League teams are, on average, already far better than teams in any other league. And then in the Champions League the Premier League teams get to play against an easier schedule than any other team on average.
5. The Premier League is physically more difficult than the Champions League
Ahead of Newcastle’s final league-stage match against PSG, Anthony Gordon He was asked about the difference between playing in the Premier League and the Champions League.
“Teams are more open in the Champions League,” he said. “They all try and play. It’s less transitional. In the Premier League, it’s become more physical than I ever thought it would be. It’s like a basketball game at times. It’s very relentless physically. There’s not much control; it’s a running game. It’s about duels – whoever wins the duel wins the game.
“The Champions League is a somewhat old style of play. It’s somewhat football-based. Teams come in and try to play proper football. In the Premier League now you’re seeing a lot more throw-ins, set pieces. It’s become a lot slower and more set piece-based.”
There are two obvious ways we can support this with some evidence. The first is by looking at the number of long throw-ins per game – in both the Champions League and Premier League this year and last year.
In the Premier League last season, per graduation game According to the data, the average game consists of 1.22 long throws. And that’s basically what we’ve seen so far in the Champions League, about 1.23 per game. But in the Premier League it Year? Teams are combining for 3.59 long throws per game. this is one on a large scale Changes from year to year.
In a recent study On the set piece revolution in England, analyst Michael Kelly found that Premier League teams are launching 45% of their throw-ins into the box from attacking areas, compared to only 17% on average over the previous four seasons.
Similarly, there has been an increased emphasis on fighting for balls in the air – or, as Gordon called it, dueling. When he says that teams in Europe “try to play football”, he means that they try to move the ball up the field through passing combinations. In the Premier League this year, everything that happens on the field is determined by who gets to the ball in the air first – or who gets to the ball after someone else has got to the ball in the air.
In England, teams are combining to attempt 110 aerial challenges per game this season. This is significantly higher than last season’s number – 86.6 per game – and an even bigger deviation from what we see in the Champions League: 77.3 per game.
Sure, there were four teams in the Champions League league stage that had an expected goal difference of plus-2 or better from set pieces – and they all came from the Premier League. In fact, all six Premier League teams are ranked in the top 10 for set piece performances:
There is perhaps no better example of how different things are in the Premier League and Champions League than the team that won the Premier League last season.
As you can see above, Liverpool were a dominant set piece force in the Champions League league stage. But in the Premier League, well, not so much:
Put more simply, Liverpool lead the Champions League with a plus-8 goal difference from set pieces – and they are second in the Premier League. Loan-6 goal difference from set pieces. Not only can Liverpool dominate less physical opponents in Europe with set pieces, but they are also capable of playing the football that Gordon refers to on top of it. In England, they are completing 86.3% of their passes outside the attacking third, while in Europe this number has risen to 90%.
Then, the financial and tactical trends of world football have converged in such a way that the already large gap between the best teams in Europe’s best leagues has increased.
While, in the past, it was true that Premier League teams were more physical than teams in other leagues, those other leagues had their own kind of technical, tactical and skill-based advantages. But now Premier League teams are pulling the most valuable strategic levers (set pieces) more aggressively than the rest of the world, their players are much more physical, and since teams now have a lot of money, their players are just as, if not more, skilled than players in every other league. Add in the rules-based quirk that prevents them playing each other, and you get five Premier League teams automatically qualifying for the round of 16.
And for a team stuck in the playoffs? Remember that Champions League set piece chart in which Newcastle were fourth behind Liverpool, Arsenal and Chelsea? If we expanded it to all 36 teams in the league stage, Qarabag would be in last place.
You can guess what is going to happen in their next two matches. It will probably look pretty similar to what the first eight did.
