November 2015. The Allianz Arena, Munich. A decade ago, yet a lifetime away for Arsenal in the Champions League.
That night Arsène Wenger’s team were so shredded in a 5-1 defeat by Bayern Munich that my Guardian colleague David Hytner likened them to “the chicken feed from the lower reaches of the Bundesliga that Bayern routinely gobble up”. It was Arsenal’s joint‑worst 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.
Back then English football wasn’t 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 – Manchester City and Leicester – 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?
Now look. Arsenal are now the best team in Europe, at least according to Club Elo ratings, based on every team’s results and the strength of their opponents. Bayern, who travel to the Emirates Stadium on Wednesday, are third. And, most astonishingly, 12 Premier League sides are in the top 20.
But watching Arsenal’s dismissive victory in the north London derby, during a weekend when Bayern smashed Freiburg 6-2 and Paris Saint-Germain brushed past Le Havre 3-0, a couple of questions bubbled to the surface.
First: can we say how much stronger the Premier League is now compared with 2015, when Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi were at Real Madrid and Barcelona, and Pep Guardiola was masterminding Bayern’s destruction of Arsenal?
And second: could it be better for a team who play in an “easier” league – such as Bayern and PSG – to keep players fresher for the Champions League knockout stages? Or do clubs such as Arsenal and Manchester City benefit from tougher domestic competition?
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’s model, which assesses the quality of 7,000 teams globally based on their results, suggests that figure would rise significantly in other leagues.
According to Chaudhuri, clubs such as Arsenal and Manchester City would have a 9% higher win rate if playing in La Liga – and between 13% and 15% in the Bundesliga, Serie A and Ligue 1.
“A top Premier League team would expect to win 86 points in the league today,” he says. “If they were playing in La Liga, they would expect to win about 97 points, in Bundesliga 91 points from 34 matches, and in Serie A just over 100 points.”
To put that in context, last season Barcelona won the Spanish title with 88 points. Bayern and Napoli won the German and Italian leagues respectively with 82 points apiece.
“It’s worth saying how much the Premier League has pulled away,” Chaudhuri says. “Ten years ago the best team in England would have had a similar win rate – ie 66% if playing in La Liga or the Bundesliga, and 6%‑13% higher in Italy and France.”
Money talks, of course. It has helped the Premier League to bring in even more of the world’s 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 also strive harder to find undervalued players.
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.
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 “easier” league can help to achieve European glory?
Certainly the luxury of rotating players can’t hurt. Opta’s 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.
PSG’s top five players in terms of minutes in Europe last season – Willian Pacho, Achraf Hakimi, Nuno Mendes, Vitinha and Marquinhos – played fewer than 53% of the team’s minutes in the league.
Meanwhile, Reid notes that Liverpool’s 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.
But it is not as simple as that. When Chaudhuri examined the results of the 14 clubs who, since 2016, have averaged at least €300m in revenue, and the interplay between domestic and Champions League success, he found no clear correlation.
Bayern, for instance, have won 72% of domestic league fixtures and 71% of Champions League fixtures over the past decade – 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.
Meanwhile, in the past four and a half years Inter have a domestic win percentage similar to PSG’s and Bayern’s – but they also have a less impressive win percentage in the Champions League over the same period. In other words, a “softer” domestic schedule doesn’t seem to have helped.
Finally, the fact Premier League clubs also have had vastly different win rates in the Champions League, 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.
For those still unconvinced, Chaudhuri offers this thought experiment. “If Manchester City were relegated to the Championship tomorrow and retained their entire squad, we wouldn’t expect it to make that much difference to their Champions League performance,” he says. “Notwithstanding the obvious practical challenges regarding midweeks.”
It is 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 how much football’s power balance has shifted since 2015.
