In European football, money is supposed to talk. In the Premier League’s case, it tends to shout.
The richest league on the planet has hoovered up talent, inflated transfer markets and bent the sport’s economic gravity towards England. Power in the boardroom? Undeniable. Power in the transfer market? Absolute.
But power is not the same as dominance. And this week in Europe has underlined that, yet again, the Premier League’s swagger doesn’t quite translate into continental control.
A bruising week on the continent
Six first legs, no English wins. An aggregate score of Europe 16, Premier League 6. No one is out yet, no one is through, but those numbers strip away a lot of the hype.
Five of those six ties were away from home, which matters. So does the ongoing soap opera that is Tottenham Hotspur. Still, watching Manchester City brushed aside by Champions League specialists Real Madrid, Chelsea wilt in Paris against last season’s winners PSG, and Arsenal grind their way to a 1-1 draw at Bayer Leverkusen felt very familiar.
This is the time of year when English clubs often start to look the same: drained, heavy-legged, mentally frayed. This week, they looked knackered.
Chelsea conceded twice late on, turning a manageable PSG deficit into something far more daunting. City were blown away by three Federico Valverde goals in 23 minutes. Spurs were 4-0 down after 23 minutes. These aren’t isolated lapses; they’re the sort of collapses that come when bodies and minds are at their limit.
The league that never lets up
The Premier League still sets the pace for intensity. Week after week, it is probably the fastest, most physically demanding competition in Europe, maybe anywhere. That relentlessness comes at a cost.
You cannot replicate that intensity every three or four days without something giving. Injuries mount, legs tire, concentration slips. Performances drop. It happens every season.
For English clubs and the national team, the sense is that players are edging towards breaking point. The calendar keeps expanding: a bloated Club World Cup last summer featuring Chelsea and City, the Nations League, enlarged Champions League and Europa League formats, expanded World Cups. All of it layered on top of a domestic division already played at full throttle.
Other countries sometimes bend to help their clubs. England rarely does.
Chelsea, for instance, were dragged through extra time by Championship side Wrexham at the weekend. PSG, meanwhile, were handed the weekend off altogether when Nantes and the Ligue de Football Professionnel agreed to postpone their game. That sort of accommodation is almost unthinkable in England.
In Germany, Bayern Munich’s 4-1 win over Borussia Monchengladbach was moved to a Friday night to give them an extra 24 hours before a Tuesday trip to Atalanta. In England, Newcastle United and Manchester City were knocking lumps out of each other late on Saturday in an FA Cup fifth-round tie.
It isn’t just fixture timing. It’s the sheer brutality of the league itself.
No such thing as an easy weekend
The cliché about “no easy games” in the Premier League has never felt more accurate.
Even Wolverhampton Wanderers, on course at one stage for one of the worst top-flight points totals in history, took four points off Arsenal and Liverpool in the space of two weeks. That’s the landscape English clubs live in.
Look at the weekend of January 24-25. Liverpool lost at Bournemouth. Spurs drew at Burnley. Newcastle were beaten at home by Aston Villa.
Yet around those domestic stumbles, the same clubs were cruising in Europe. Liverpool thrashed Marseille and Qarabag 9-0 on aggregate. Spurs brushed aside Borussia Dortmund and Eintracht Frankfurt 2-0 – their only wins of the calendar year after 12 domestic games without victory. Newcastle hammered PSV 3-0 and drew 1-1 away at PSG.
At that stage, English sides were sauntering through Europe. Five Premier League teams finished in the top eight of the Champions League league phase, and a record nine English clubs reached the knockout stages across the three UEFA competitions.
It was tempting to declare, once more, that England had the strongest league and the best teams in Europe. But the winners’ podium tells a colder story.
The myth of English dominance
Over the past five seasons, 10 clubs have reached the Champions League final. Four of them have been English, producing two winners: Chelsea in 2021 and Manchester City in 2023. Spain has matched that with two titles of its own, both via Real Madrid in 2022 and 2024.
The Europa League paints a similar picture. Three English finalists out of 10, just one winner – Spurs last season. Spain again has two winners in that period, Villarreal in 2021 and Sevilla in 2023.
That is not dominance. Not even close.
Dominance is what La Liga delivered in the mid-2010s. Between 2014 and 2018, Spanish clubs won nine of the 10 Champions League and Europa League titles. Real Madrid took four Champions Leagues, Barcelona one. Sevilla collected three Europa Leagues, Atletico Madrid one. Only Manchester United’s 2017 Europa League success broke the monopoly.
By that standard, the Premier League’s European record in the current era looks patchy. Individually and collectively, English clubs have struggled to crack Europe on a consistent basis.
Even Pep Guardiola, whose Manchester City have bent the domestic game to their will with six Premier League titles in nine completed seasons, has found Europe a harder nut to crack. In that time, he has reached two Champions League finals and one semi-final. With a 3-0 deficit to overturn against Real Madrid, improving that record this season looks unlikely.
If Guardiola walks away this summer, he will leave with a decade of near-total domestic control and a single Champions League triumph. That ratio would roughly mirror Sir Alex Ferguson’s at Manchester United, achieved in an era when English clubs were widely seen as technically and tactically inferior to their continental rivals.
The grind continues
Mikel Arteta knows how unforgiving this competition can be. After Arsenal were undone by a Bayer Leverkusen corner routine in a 1-1 draw in Germany, he was asked whether it was a reminder of the scale of the challenge.
“Yes, and how difficult it is to win against any opponent in the competition and especially away from home,” he said. “There is a big factor there. We knew the importance of the game and the difficulty of the opponent and now we need to finish it in London.”
Before they can think about that, Arsenal face Everton at home. Hardly a gentle warm-up.
Chelsea and Newcastle might prefer to rest players ahead of their second legs. Instead, they face each other this weekend. Spurs, fighting for their lives in a relegation battle, travel to Liverpool, who themselves are chasing Champions League qualification for next season. City head to a rejuvenated West Ham United, knowing another slip could be fatal in the title race.
It is relentless. Always.
Arsenal should complete the job against Leverkusen in London. Chelsea, Spurs and City might yet conjure something extraordinary in their second legs. Liverpool could still overturn Galatasaray. Newcastle might produce one of the great nights in their history away to Barcelona.
But while Bayern, Real Madrid and PSG – clubs with financial muscle to rival the Premier League’s elite but without the same domestic exhaustion – shifted up through the gears this week when it really mattered, the English clubs largely did the opposite.
History suggests that should not surprise anyone. The question is whether the Premier League will ever find a way to turn its financial clout into the kind of sustained European dominance it so often assumes it already has.
