This is the point in a football season when bad news gets confirmed.
Usually that has been relegation, or mathematical failure to reach the play-offs, or perhaps a favourite player not being on your club’s retained list.
This season there has been an exciting new entry to the scene: the confident-then-agonising wait to see if the Premier League would claim a fifth spot in the 2024-25 Champions League. And this week came confirmation of what we have suspected for a while: no, it would not.
For reasons we have explained before (see below), the Champions League’s new-look format next season has an additional four places, two of which are awarded based on each league’s seasonal coefficient, which is in turn determined by how its clubs perform in the three European club competitions in 2023-24.
Understandably, English top-flight enthusiasts were wildly confident that their division would be one of the competitions to benefit. This is the Premier League, after all.
Last season Manchester City won the Champions League, West Ham United won the UEFA Conference League and all four Premier League representatives in the Champions League made it past Christmas and into the knockout stages. Most of UEFA’s calculation machinations are based on a five-year rolling coefficient, of which the Premier League is still miles clear at the top.
But it feels like England’s current dominance of the longer-term coefficient only served to drop the Premier League into an overly-hubristic position for much of 2023-24. In the same way that a league title is a better indication of team strength than a cup win, a five-year rolling ranking is indeed a better judge of a competition’s strength than a single season shootout, but the latter is precisely what these additional Champions League spots are based on.
There’s an irony that the desire for UEFA — or rather UEFA’s major clubs — to make the continent’s flagship competition less random and less predictable in 2024-25 has turned 2023-24 into a strangely compelling short-term battle between three of its leading leagues. And, for this year at least, the Premier League has been trounced by Serie A and the Bundesliga.
Among Opta’s melange of supercomputers is one that has been predicting who would get the additional spots throughout this season, based on team and league strength and a subsequent simulation of the remainder of the various European campaigns. And it’s noticeable that it wasn’t until late February that the predictive model had either of the other challengers a more likely recipient of a fifth Champions League spot. Serie A was the first competition to overtake the Premier League, in late February, but at that point England’s top-flight was still deemed a safe bet.
Future historians may look back on the European quarter-final draws in mid-March as the key turning point. Not only were Arsenal paired with Bayern but West Ham were drawn against Xabi Alonso’s infallible Bayer Leverkusen, while Liverpool had to face Atalanta from Serie A. In many years these would simply have been labelled as interesting ties but in the context of 2023-24 they were coefficient superclasicos.
A dismal April that saw Manchester City, Arsenal, West Ham and Liverpool all exit Europe in the same week all but sealed the deal. By April 19 the mighty Premier League had only a one per cent chance of finishing as one of the top two UEFA competitions this season. This week a combination of Bayern, Dortmund and Aston Villa ensured it was over.
So who’s to blame? Who can the team who finish in fifth place — Tottenham, probably — point their fingers at when they are handed a mildly-enticing Europa League spot in 2024-25 instead of a shiny ticket to the Champions League?
Maybe… everyone?
Maybe Newcastle and Manchester United should have avoided finishing bottom of their groups (the first time two Premier League sides have done this in the same season) in the autumn. Even third place would have granted them access to European football in the spring — as it was they barely contributed to England’s coefficient points total this season, although Eddie Howe will surely point the two qualifiers from Newcastle’s group — Real Madrid and Borussia Dortmund — contesting one of the semi-finals.
Maybe Brighton should have done better under the historic lights of the Stadio Olimpico in early March, although that was an understandably daunting task in the club’s first-ever European adventure.
Maybe Liverpool should have attempted some form of defending in their home tie against Atalanta last month — that 3-0 defeat at Anfield all-but condemning the Europa League favourites to an early exit.
Maybe Arsenal could have stayed a bit calmer when they were on top and in the lead against Bayern at the Emirates.
Maybe Tottenham shouldn’t have sold Harry Kane to Bayern Munich — no player has scored more than than the Englishman’s eight goals in the Champions League this season and he still has a reasonable chance of guiding his new employers to a potentially all-German final at Wembley next month.
Maybe Jude Bellingham shouldn’t have joined Real Madrid and helped them knock out holders Manchester City in the quarter-finals.
Maybe West Ham could have done what no other side has done this season and found a way to defeat Bayer Leverkusen, almost certainly the best Bundesliga team in one of that league’s strongest-ever seasons.
In reality this was death by a thousand cuts for the Premier League. A freak season that came along just when it didn’t need one. 2023-24 will be only the second season in the last nine that won’t feature at least one Premier League side in a European final, and that’s assuming Aston Villa don’t overturn their two-goal deficit against Olympiakos next week.
And Villa will probably be the one side who do benefit continentally from this season, even if they do exit the Conference League in the semi-finals. Tottenham’s defeat at Chelsea on Thursday makes Unai Emery’s side overwhelming favourites to finish in fourth place. Five Champions League spots was always going to open qualification up to new sides, and Villa, who haven’t played in Europe’s premier competition since 1982-83, now look likely to get an opportunity to do so next season.
Maybe four Champions League places was plenty after all.
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