La Liga is well ahead of the Premier League as the strongest and most consistent in the Champions League – and the stats prove it.
A study by Press Association Sport looked at each competition from 1992-93 onwards and found the Spanish league came out on top, with Barcelona the most successful individual club.
With points awarded to clubs on a sliding scale, from one for losing at the quarter-final stage to four for winning the trophy, Barca scored 30 points, while La Liga racked up a cumulative tally of 79, 11 better than that managed by Premier League sides.
That will come as little surprise to English football fans, who saw their last representatives in the tournament Manchester City knocked out by Barca last night, leaving no Premier League representatives in the last eight for the second time in three seasons.
In fact, no English team made it into the top three, with Real Madrid (29) second and Bayern Munich (28) third. Manchester United were the top performing English club on 26, with Chelsea the next best Premier League team on 19 points.
Not only does La Liga have more points overall than the Premier League, they were also amassed by more clubs – seven contributed to Spain’s tally compared to six for England – so the argument that domestic competition is keener in the Premier League is not borne out by the study either.
The Premier League is in a period of relative decline according to the study. The golden years were evidently 2006-07 to 2008-09, where English clubs earned 25 points over three seasons including the highest single score in this study of 10 points in 2007-08, when United and Chelsea contested the final in Moscow.
Chelsea were the lone representatives in the last eight as they won the title in 2012, with 2013 a barren year for English clubs and only three points gained in 2013-14.
Liverpool’s triumph in 2005 and final appearance two years later make them the third-best English club in the study period on 11 points, though of course going back to the European Cup era they have a further four titles to boast about. Arsenal have accrued nine points and are the highest-placed team in the whole study not to have won the competition.
The success of AC Milan and Juventus in the 1990s and the early part of the last decade means Serie A has performed better in this study overall than the Bundesliga, but a look at the season-by-season points tallies shows Italian success drying up in recent years with German clubs seemingly on the rise.
The study also shows how the Champions League has increasingly become a closed shop to the biggest leagues and teams.
In the first five editions of the rebranded competition only national champions were admitted, but the spread of countries involved in the last eight has steadily declined since UEFA opted to grant entry to non-champion clubs from the strongest nations from 1997-98 onwards, with just four countries represented in five of those seasons covered by the study, including the most recent 2013-14 campaign.
Source: SNAPPA
