As the dust settles on another round of European ties, the Premier League’s status as the best league in the world has taken a bit of a punch to the ribs.
Manchester City and Arsenal’s exits from the Champions League on Wednesday were followed up by Liverpool and West Ham United waving goodbye to the Europa League the following evening. Aston Villa’s penalty shootout victory over Lille in the Europa Conference League leaves Unai Emery’s side as the only English team flying the flag in Europe.
Those results mean the Premier League is almost certain to miss out on an extra spot in next season’s expanded Champions League, falling behind Germany and Italy in UEFA’s coefficient rankings.
The mockery of England’s eliminated clubs might linger in the short-term, but is the Premier League actually getting weaker?
With six games to go and two points separating the top three teams, we are witnessing one of the most exciting title races in the Premier League era.
Throw in the hunt for the remaining European spots — and the fact there are more goals per game than any campaign in recent memory — and Maximus Decimus Meridius in Gladiator comes to mind.
“Are you not entertained?”
The Premier League brand dwarfs all other European leagues, but the quality on show each weekend is what makes it the most-watched sports league in the world.
In statistical terms, English sides still have a continental stranglehold over their European rivals when looking at UEFA’s five-year coefficient rankings, but these coefficients can be complex, confusing and cumbersome to track.
They also act as a crude measure of league strength.
Instead, let’s turn to a data-driven model by Twenty First Group, a sports intelligence firm that advises clubs, leagues and investors.
Its World Super League model uses a machine-learning algorithm to generate a single rating for every team in world football. League strength can then be calculated from the average rating of each team.
“Between 2008-09 and 2017-18, La Liga was the highest-quality league in the world in our ratings,” says Aurel Nazmiu, a senior data scientist at Twenty First Group.
“Since then, the Premier League has taken top spot — coinciding with Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp’s era of dominance, which now includes Mikel Arteta (Arsenal are rated as the best team in Twenty First Group’s ratings).
“The gap between the Premier League and the rest has been increasing since 2018-19. In 2022-23, the gap between the top two leagues was the biggest it has ever been.”
That continued dominance is reflected when plotting the top 20 leagues together, where the average Premier League team has a rating of 750 within Twenty First Group’s model.
However, the graphic above opens up an interesting question.
The values provided are an average among all teams within each league, but how much variation is there among those values to calculate that average?
Think about it. Two leagues could have the same average rating, but one league might have 20 teams with equal quality, while another has a huge imbalance between the best and the worst teams.
Using the Premier League as an example, the boxplot below shows this distribution within Twenty First Group’s ratings. The gold line reflects the average team rating in the league, with most teams falling within the middle 50 per cent of the group (shown by the red box). However, it is important to note the more extreme values of Manchester City and Arsenal, who sit outside the boxplot in this league (shown by black dots). For those wondering, this statistical term means they are more than 1.5 times outside that middle 50 per cent, so are presented as outliers.
Returning to our top 20 leagues, you can now see how much variation there is between teams within each league to form this average.
This shows just how imbalanced some leagues can be in their status, where the gap from the best to the worst teams can be huge. For example, Italy’s Serie A has a wide variety of team ratings (shown by a wider red box and whiskers), but Serie B has a greater concentration of teams of similar quality.
The competitiveness of the Premier League has been one of the key attributes that has made the product the most sellable around the world. A league where, supposedly, any team can beat one another — but is that still strictly true?
Beyond the lucrative TV broadcast deals, media rights, and general financial revenue the Premier League generates compared with its European peers, can we calculate how much inequality there is within a league?
The concept of competitive balance in football has existed for a long time within academic research and it can be measured in different ways.
One method could be to analyse the distribution of points across the league table. However, the performance of a team can be skewed by the outcome — sometimes the best teams don’t win.
Let’s dive deeper and analyse the spread of each club’s squad value across the leagues using Twenty First Group’s ‘value’ model. This model calculates each player’s position-specific contribution to their team based on a performance rating, ignoring market factors such as contract length, economic conditions, or the financial power of buying leagues — instead focusing on the inherent value of the individual player.
Each club’s overall ‘squad value’ is simply the total across all players within each club.
For those wondering, Manchester City top the list with a squad value of £1.32billion ($1.64bn). At the bottom of the list, spare a thought for Volendam, the Dutch club whose squad value is £20million — the approximate equivalent of Erling Haaland’s right leg.
To analyse this spread of squad values, we can calculate a ‘Gini coefficient’ for each league, an economics measure typically used to evaluate the wealth distribution across a country’s population.
Rather than a population, this analysis will assess the wealth distribution across each league. The output is presented on a scale from zero (all squads have the same value) to 100 per cent (one squad has the whole league’s value). The lower the value, the more evenly distributed the squad values are within the league.
Running the numbers across the top five European leagues — plus the Dutch Eredivisie and Portuguese Primeira Liga — the Premier League and Ligue 1 come out as the two most equitable leagues.
This passes the eye test.
Few people thought the so-called ‘Big Four’ of Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool and Manchester United could ever be disrupted in the early 2000s, but that expanded to a ‘Big Six’ with Manchester City and Tottenham and they must now be aware of the additional growth of Aston Villa, Newcastle United, West Ham United and Brighton & Hove Albion in the fight for European places — as those four make up the top 10 most-valuable Premier League squads in Twenty First Group’s model.
Meanwhile, Paris Saint-Germain undoubtedly loom over France’s top division with their eye-watering squad value of £816million — more than double their nearest competitor (Rennes, £329million).
However, the competitive performances of Monaco, Lille, Nice, Lens, Marseille, Lyon and Rennes make for greater equality across the league, where each will be typically fighting for European spots — not to mention Brest’s overperformance this season as they sit in second place despite their estimated squad value being the 13th highest in France.
Ligue 1’s greater competitiveness might also be influenced by this season’s change from 20 teams to 18. With fewer teams, you are more likely to have a more closely concentrated spread of quality across the league.
France and England are not streets ahead of Serie A or La Liga, but there is a notable bump up when assessing the greater inequality in the Bundesliga.
You know the next part. Bayern Munich are the powerhouses of German football, with the financial clout that can mix it with Europe’s best. A squad value of £933million is galaxies away from bottom-placed Darmstadt (£50million), who are only competing in Germany’s top division for the third time this century.
(Sven Hoppe/Picture Alliance via Getty Images)
You might argue that this comparison is no different from Luton Town and Manchester City, but the eye-watering revenue generated from television deals means that even the 20th-placed Premier League side earns close to £100million per season to invest in their squad — which dwarfs their European counterparts.
But it is not just the difference from top to bottom in the Bundesliga. Bayer Leverkusen’s title win is all the more impressive when considering the difference in estimated squad value (£599million) compared with their Bavarian counterparts. The odds are stacked against any team not called Bayern Munich, who have won 18 out of 25 titles since 2000.
Finally, the Eredivisie and Primeira Liga’s lack of competitiveness is reflected in the numbers as two leagues with the greatest inequality — and this is no surprise.
In the Netherlands, PSV Eindhoven, Feyenoord and (in normal circumstances) Ajax are capable of competing in Europe’s elite competitions with squad values that exceed £200million, but teams such as Volendam (£20million) and Excelsior (£24million) have squads whose value resembles a League One side, in English pyramid terms.
Likewise, the dominance of Sporting Lisbon, Benfica and Porto means the quality chasm that exists is unlikely to be closed in Portugal without a major shake-up. Braga are the only ones pushing them close, but 14 of the 18 teams in the Primeira Liga have squad values that fall below £100million.
This season’s Premier League is among the most competitive in Europe, but how has this changed over time?
Running the analysis across each season since 2019-20, the 2022-23 campaign had the lowest inequality across the league, with a Gini coefficient of 31 per cent. That season was the most competitive across the whole sample of seven leagues in this period.
A total of 14 in-season manager departures — the most in Premier League history — signified just how much the pack was shuffling last season as each side clawed for their best finish.
With Newcastle, Brighton and Aston Villa landing European spots, a relegation fight going to the wire, and the second-lowest title-winning points tally from Manchester City for seven seasons, there was a lot to keep the pulse racing right up until May.
How does this compare across Europe?
The Bundesliga has remained comparably steady over time, sitting just above Serie A, whose competitiveness at the top of the table is particularly notable. Four different champions in five seasons shows the rotating cast of title-winners, and while Inter Milan are the outright leaders in terms of squad value (£714million) — and position in the league table — there is little to choose between the squad values of AC Milan, Juventus, Atalanta and Roma in recent seasons.
Elsewhere, La Liga’s subtle trend towards greater competitiveness is similar to Ligue 1.
Real Madrid, Barcelona and (to a lesser extent) Atletico Madrid remain the three squads with the largest value, but the improved strength of Girona, Athletic Bilbao and Real Sociedad in the past 18 months has made for a more equitable league among those fighting for Europe. Looking wider, Rayo Vallecano and Cadiz are the only two sides whose squad value is less than £100million — the fewest since 2019-20 in Spain’s top division.
At the other end of the scale, the Eredivisie boasts four seasons with the highest inequality since 2019-20, with the Primeira Liga not far behind, which highlights that the lack of competitiveness has largely remained disappointingly stable.
Should anyone care about this? From a Premier League perspective, it is interesting to look at this via a recruitment lens.
If you’re spotting a player in the Eredivisie or the Primeira Liga who looks to be a world-beater, it might need to be seasoned with some context that they can often be facing sides of significantly lower quality.
While there have been success stories directly from the Dutch top division to the Premier League, the mixed performances of Noni Madueke, Cody Gakpo and Antony since the start of last season show that success in the Eredivisie does not directly translate to a more competitive league.
The numbers back up what the eye can see as the Premier League marries the world’s best players with one of the world’s most competitive divisions. A few teams dropping out of European competition does not change that.
A league with greater competitiveness makes for a better product. A better product is likely to have more investment and more investment is likely to grow the league and subsequently lead to… even greater competitiveness.
It’s a virtuous cycle.
(Top photo: Xavier Laine/Getty Images)