\n<\/p>\n
November 2015. The Allianz Arena, Munich. A decade ago, yet a lifetime away for Arsenal in the Champions\u00a0League.<\/p>\n
That night Ars\u00e8ne Wenger\u2019s team were so shredded in a 5-1 defeat by Bayern\u00a0Munich that my Guardian colleague David Hytner likened them to \u201cthe\u00a0chicken feed from the lower reaches of the Bundesliga that Bayern routinely gobble up\u201d. It was Arsenal\u2019s joint\u2011worst result in Europe. And to rub it in, Bayern repeated the trick the following season. Twice: 5-1 at home, then 5-1 at the Emirates Stadium.<\/p>\n
Back then English football wasn\u2019t just off the pace in the Champions League but in danger of being lapped. Across the 2015-16 and 2016-17 seasons, only two Premier League teams \u2013 Manchester City and Leicester \u2013 made it past the last 16. Remember the bloodletting and postmortems? The grasping for reasons why, for all their riches, English teams were struggling in Europe? The endless calls for a winter break?<\/p>\n
Now look. Arsenal are now the best team in Europe, at least according to Club Elo ratings, based on every team\u2019s results and the strength of their opponents. Bayern, who travel to the Emirates\u00a0Stadium on Wednesday, are third. And, most astonishingly, 12\u00a0Premier League sides are in the top 20.<\/p>\n
But watching Arsenal\u2019s dismissive victory in the north London derby, during a weekend when Bayern smashed Freiburg 6-2 and Paris Saint-Germain brushed past Le\u00a0Havre 3-0, a couple of questions bubbled to the surface.<\/p>\n
First: can we say how much stronger the Premier\u00a0League is now compared with 2015, when Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi were at Real\u00a0Madrid and Barcelona, and Pep Guardiola was masterminding Bayern\u2019s destruction of Arsenal?<\/p>\n
<\/span>Harry Kane, who is on a prolific run with Bayern, will present a familiar challenge for Arsenal.<\/span> Photograph: S Mellar\/FC Bayern\/Getty Images<\/p>\n And second: could it be better for a team who play in an \u201ceasier\u201d league \u2013 such as Bayern and PSG \u2013 to keep players fresher for the Champions League knockout stages? Or do clubs such as Arsenal and Manchester City benefit from tougher domestic competition?<\/p>\n To help, I asked Omar Chaudhuri, the chief intelligence officer at Twenty First Group, which works with leading clubs across Europe, to crunch some numbers. As Chaudhuri points out, a leading Premier League team would expect to win about 66% of games in the top flight. But Twenty First Group\u2019s model, which assesses the quality of 7,000 teams globally based on their results, suggests that figure would rise significantly in other leagues.<\/p>\n According to Chaudhuri, clubs such as Arsenal and Manchester City would have a 9% higher win rate if playing in La Liga \u2013 and between 13% and 15% in the Bundesliga, Serie A and Ligue 1.<\/p>\n \u201cA top Premier League team would expect to win 86 points in the league today,\u201d he says. \u201cIf they were playing in La Liga, they would expect to win about 97\u00a0points, in Bundesliga 91 points from 34 matches, and in Serie A just over 100 points.\u201d<\/p>\n To put that in context, last season Barcelona won the Spanish title with 88 points. Bayern and Napoli won\u00a0the German and Italian leagues respectively with\u00a082\u00a0points apiece.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s worth saying how much\u00a0the\u00a0Premier\u00a0League has pulled away,\u201d Chaudhuri\u00a0says. \u201cTen years ago the best team in England would have had a similar win rate \u2013 ie\u00a066%\u00a0if\u00a0playing in La\u00a0Liga or the Bundesliga, and 6%\u201113% higher in Italy and France.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>Declan Rice cost Arsenal \u00a3105m, an amount far beyond the means of most European rivals.<\/span> Photograph: David Price\/Arsenal FC\/Getty Images<\/p>\n Money talks, of course. It has helped the Premier League to bring in even more of the world\u2019s best players and coaches. But clubs are generally smarter and more professional, too. The more sophisticated owners want more bang for their buck when it comes to player performance and\u00a0also strive harder to\u00a0find undervalued\u00a0players.<\/p>\n A final factor is the Elite Player Performance Plan, which has supercharged the quality of players coming out of Premier League academies. The days when England were knocked out of the Euros by Iceland certainly seem a long way behind us.<\/p>\n And so to the second question: does the success last season of PSG, who breezed to the Ligue 1 title by 19 points and lifted the Champions League, suggest playing in an \u201ceasier\u201d league can help to achieve European glory?<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Sign up to Football Daily<\/span><\/p>\n Kick off your evenings with the Guardian’s take on the world of football<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Certainly the luxury of rotating players can\u2019t hurt. Opta\u2019s data insights editor Michael Reid notes that PSG made an average of 4.78 changes to their starting XI between matches last season, more than any other Champions League club, while Inter, who they beat in the final, were third when it came to most rotations.<\/p>\n PSG\u2019s top five players in terms of minutes in Europe last season \u2013 Willian Pacho, Achraf Hakimi, Nuno Mendes, Vitinha and Marquinhos \u2013 played fewer than 53% of the team\u2019s minutes in the league.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Reid notes that Liverpool\u2019s top five players in terms of minutes played in the 2024-25 season were among the highest across Champions League clubs. No wonder they looked so knackered in the spring.<\/p>\n <\/span> Photograph: Twenty First Group<\/p>\n But it is not as simple as that. When Chaudhuri examined the results of the 14 clubs who, since 2016, have averaged at least \u20ac300m in revenue, and the interplay between domestic and Champions League success, he found no clear correlation.<\/p>\n Bayern, for instance, have won 72% of domestic league fixtures and 71% of Champions League fixtures over the past decade \u2013 the best record among the richest 14 clubs. PSG have the same 72% win percentage in Ligue 1 but a 56% win percentage in the Champions League.<\/p>\n <\/span> Photograph: Twenty First Group<\/p>\n Meanwhile, in the past four and a half years Inter have a domestic win percentage similar to PSG\u2019s and Bayern\u2019s \u2013 but they also have a less impressive win percentage in the Champions League over the same period. In other words, a \u201csofter\u201d domestic schedule doesn\u2019t seem to have helped.<\/p>\n Finally, the fact Premier League clubs also\u00a0have had\u00a0vastly different win rates in the Champions\u00a0League, ranging from more than 60% for Liverpool and Manchester City to less than 50% for Spurs and Manchester United, further suggests the quality of the squad and how well a club spend their vast revenues matter most.<\/p>\n For those still unconvinced, Chaudhuri offers this\u00a0thought experiment. \u201cIf Manchester City were relegated to the Championship tomorrow and retained their entire\u00a0squad, we wouldn\u2019t expect it to make that much\u00a0difference to their Champions League performance,\u201d he says. \u201cNotwithstanding the obvious practical challenges regarding midweeks.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u00a0is hard to argue with that. Or the fact that Arsenal v Bayern is not only one of the most mouthwatering clashes of the season so far but a stark reminder of\u00a0how much football\u2019s\u00a0power balance has shifted since 2015.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" November 2015. The Allianz Arena, Munich. A decade ago, yet a lifetime away for Arsenal in the Champions\u00a0League. That night Ars\u00e8ne Wenger\u2019s team were so shredded in a 5-1 defeat by Bayern\u00a0Munich that my Guardian colleague David Hytner likened them to \u201cthe\u00a0chicken feed from the lower reaches of the Bundesliga that Bayern routinely gobble up\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35131,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[3366,1639,2926,6856,2276,1664,7480,573,15166],"class_list":{"0":"post-35130","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-arsenal","9":"tag-balance","10":"tag-bayern","11":"tag-footballs","12":"tag-offers","13":"tag-power","14":"tag-reminder","15":"tag-shift","16":"tag-stark"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35130"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35130\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/35131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}