Why are Premier League teams so dominant in the Champions League?

The Guardian

In the past four seasons, the Premier League has provided nine of the 16 Champions League semi-finalists, five of the finalists and two of the winners. Spain, in the same period, has yielded three semi-finalists, Italy two and the Netherlands one. The Premier League has become, fairly incontrovertibly, the dominant force in Europe at the moment.

But these last four years are unprecedented, and with all four Premier League sides well-placed to progress to the quarter-finals, there is little reason to believe the hegemony will not continue. Which begs the question of, why?


Money, money, money and its lack of even distribution

The obvious answer, of course, is money. The various television deals, huge attendance figures and marketing potential combine to make the Premier League the richest in the world. The most recent Deloitte figures for the league as a whole covers 2005-06, and places the Premier League top with an average revenue of $700m, Serie A second with $490m, the Bundesliga third on $389m and La Liga fourth on $275m, with Mexico's Primera Division fifth.

So the correlation is not direct – those figures show how far ahead the Premier League is, but do not explain the relative underperformance of the Bundesliga or the overperformance of La Liga. Part of the issue, of course, is that the money is not distributed evenly.

Spain may be fourth overall, but Real Madrid and Barcelona, according to the figures for 2007-08, are the first and third richest clubs in the world. Manchester United are second, Bayern Munich fourth, with Chelsea, Arsenal and Liverpool fifth, sixth and seventh. Milan, in eighth, are the highest ranked Italian club. Again, it can be seen that there is no direct correlation to success.

That is partly because reported revenue does not necessarily translate to the ability to pay the biggest prices in the transfer market. That may be because of outstanding projects that need paying off, such as Arsenal's stadium, or it may be related to the structure of the club. A rich individual owner can spend much more readily than a club directed by a plc board.

The three rough eras of the Champions League – Italian (until 1988-89 to 1998), Spanish (1999-2004) and English dominance (2005-) – correspond with the ability of clubs in those countries to outstrip the others in transfer spending. Between 1984 and 2000, the world football transfer record was broken nine times by Italian clubs. Only twice in that period – when Alan Shearer moved to Newcastle and Denilson joined Real Betis, was the record held by non-Italian clubs.

The moves to Real Madrid of Luis Figo in 2000 and Zinedine Zidane in 2001 took the record to Spain, and ushered in their period of dominance. Transfer fees as a whole have dropped since then, but the four biggest moves since 2004 have all been to English clubs.

Money has also allowed English clubs to bring in specialists. Put bluntly, the great difference between English clubs and Italian or Spanish clubs now is not the native players, but the quality of the imports. Against Real Madrid almost a fortnight ago, to take just one snapshot of England's pulling power, Liverpool had four members of the Spain squad that had won Euro 2008; Madrid had two.

Foreign players and coaches have brought new ideas and, while the Premier League's Big Four all play in very different ways, a general balance seems to have been achieved between physicality and technique. The way United and Liverpool were able to retain possession last week, certainly, is a leap forward from the way English sides were picked off in away ties in the nineties.
Continuity and competitiveness

Perhaps the biggest advantage English clubs have, though, is that for the past five seasons, the same four clubs have qualified for the Champions League, with the addition of Everton in 2004-05. Spain in the same time has produced nine different Champions League qualifiers, Italy eight, and even Germany, restricted to three qualifying places per season, six. That gives English sides greater financial clout, a greater sense of security, and greater experience of European competition.

Which raises questions about the relative competitiveness of the domestic leagues, and how big a factor that may be. If the Big Four always remain the Big Four, why do they not suffer from a lack of competitiveness? Igor Biscan makes this point about the Croatian league: Dinamo Zagreb win the league at a canter every season, and so they lack the battle-readiness to compete against comparable sides from other countries when they face them in the Champions League qualifiers or the Uefa Cup.

Assessing relative competitiveness is hugely problematic, not least because there are so many different competitions with the same league: the title, Champions League qualification, avoiding relegation …. Surveying the figures, though, one fallacy emerges: the commonly expressed belief that it is beneficial for sides to be either so far ahead or so far behind in their domestic title race that they can concentrate on the Champions League.

In the past decade, only two sides have become European champions while coasting to their league title: Barcelona in 2005-06 won the league by 12 points and Porto in 2003-04 by eight. Similarly two sides have won the Champions League in the past decade knowing long before the season ended that they would not win their league, but would almost certainly qualify for the following season's Champions League: in 2002-03, Milan finished 11 points off the top, and five points above fifth, and in 2001-02, Real Madrid were nine points behind the Spanish champions and six points above fifth.

In each of the other six seasons, though, the Champions League has been won by a side that has had to keep battling until the end of the season. Manchester United's two Champions Leagues came in seasons in which they won the title on the final day, as did Bayern Munich's in 2001. In the other three seasons, the title was won by sides struggling to qualify for the following season's Champions League.

Milan finished only three points above fifth in 2006-07, while Liverpool in 2004-05 and Real Madrid in 1999-2000 both finished fifth, narrowly missing out on the fourth-place finish that would have guaranteed Champions League football the following season.

A similar pattern emerged in the Euros last summer. The group winners were known after two matches (a flaw in the head-to-head method of ranking sides who finish level on points). All four rested significant numbers of players for their third group game. Three of those four – Portugal, Croatia and Holland - then lost their

quarter-finals, while the other, Spain, produced their least impressive performance of the tournament, beating Italy only after a 0-0 draw and penalties.

Rotation is necessary in modern football – as the diverging fortunes of Manchester United, with their huge squad, and Aston Villa, with their slender one, indicate – but rhythm and momentum are also important. That is true not just in terms of playing style, but also psychologically: it is possible to focus too much on one competition.

The most extreme case is Internazionale who, having won Serie A three times in succession with their major rivals hamstrung by various problems, need to win the Champions League to feel any sense of fulfilment. That serves to increase the pressure: watching their timid first-half performance against Manchester United last week, the thought occurred that they might be daunted less by their opponents than by the magnitude of their own need.

Had Helenio Herrera's Inter beaten Celtic in the 1967 final, they would have become the second side to lift the trophy three times; the night before the game, the defender Tarcisio Burgnich recalls being kept awake by the sound of team-mates in neighbouring rooms vomiting with the tension. Exhausted by nerves, they were overwhelmed by Celtic's onslaught. Inter have not won the European Cup since and in a sense that neurosis has never gone away. When league titles no longer give validation, it is magnified.


Stretching domestic hegemony to breaking point

Competitiveness, though, is only good up to a point – too much of it, and players will become exhausted. It has become common to read or hear claims that there are no easy matches in English football, and that even the bottom sides give the top sides a game, as though poor foreign sides take a glance at the odds, then roll over and die. This is punditry from the school of Corporal Jones, and bears no scrutiny.

Even crude measures of competitiveness give some indication. Last season, the team finishing fourth in the Premier League, Liverpool, averaged 1.05 points per game over the course of the season more than the side finishing fourth bottom, Fulham, the greatest such gap recorded in any of Europe's major four leagues over the past decade. That gap has been greater in the Premier League than in Germany, Italy or Spain in eight of the past 10 seasons.

The suspicion must be that that figure will remain high. The Premier League is becoming more stretched. Over the past five seasons, the Premier League champions have finished an average of 24.0 points above fourth and 29.6 points above fifth. In the five seasons before that, the figures were 16 and 20.4. Given that increase has happened at a time when fourth seems to be moving increasingly far from the rest, the suggestion is that, not only is the hegemony of the Big Four increasing, but gaps are increasingly opening within in. Arsenal's struggles and Villa's improvement may be the beginning of a change, but it is too early to draw firm conclusions.

A similar process of stretching has happened across Europe over the past five years, but the gaps are smaller. Only Italy, where the champions have, on average, finished 24.4 points above fourth over the past five seasons has a bigger gulf, but that is almost entirely down to Inter's dominance – in 2006-07, they won the league by 22 points – which is why that figure must be taken in conjunction with the difference in points per game between fourth and fourth bottom: just 0.55 in Italy that season. Inter were simply better than a mass beneath; it wasn't indicative of an increasingly stratiated elite pulling away from the rest. And even then, the gap from champions to fifth was only 25.8 points, almost 15 per cent lower than the figure in England.

Again, such things are speculative, but it may be that the Premier League has hit upon a middle ground conducive to success in the Champions League. There is a sufficient gulf between top and bottom that key players can be rested, or certain games taken at half pace, but equally sufficient good sides to provide the tough encounter that ensure players do not lose their edge.

And that perhaps is the biggest threat to English hegemony: just how sustainable is the apparently ongoing stretching?