So far this summer, Premier League teams have invested at least 35 million euros in the signings of 21 different players. Of these, 12 come from clubs outside the Premier League itself.
The two most expensive signings of the summer, Florian Wirtz and Hugo Ekitike, both for Liverpool, come from the Bundesliga. The two most important signings for Arsenal, Martín Zubimendi and Viktor Gyökeres, come from the first division leagues of Spain and Portugal, respectively. And two of the three most important moves for Manchester City, Tijjani Reijnders and Rayan Cherki, incorporated new talents from the Italian Serie A and the French Ligue 1.
If you’ve followed the Premier League for a while, you’ve likely pondered the difficulty of playing in this league. The idea of the inherent superiority of English football dates back to a time when its first division was not clearly superior. However, reality and illusion sometimes intersect.
Considering the economic power of the Premier League, it is reasonable to assume that the richest football league in the world is also the most difficult to play in. But, can we put aside the stereotypes about the cold weather and long throws? And can we determine why it is more difficult to play in England than in other top-tier leagues?
How the Premier League Became the Best League in the World
Year after year, we analyze the results of the Champions League and debate which is the best league in the world. However, this year, that debate is over. Paris Saint-Germain won the Champions League, and no one, except perhaps French President Emmanuel Macron, would be willing to argue that Ligue 1 is the best football league in the world.
In reality, the debate should have ended years ago. The best teams in the Premier League are not always better than the best teams in France or Spain, but thanks to a huge financial advantage, it’s almost impossible for any other league to be as good from start to finish.
According to FBref’s estimated salary data for last season, all 20 Premier League clubs were in the top 50 for highest payrolls across Europe’s big five leagues. If salaries were distributed evenly across the leagues, each league would only have about 10 teams in the top 50. And the story is the same with Transfermarkt’s transfer valuations. Of the 25 most valuable squads in the world, 12 are from the Premier League. If distributed evenly, everyone should have five in the top 25.
For the Premier League not to be the most competitive league within that environment, there would have to be a great discrepancy in scouting and tactics, with English clubs guessing blindly while everyone else knew what they were doing, but only in a way that no one in England understood. And you would need a global squad of players and coaches who didn’t care about making as much money as they could. With the now diverse groups of owners, technical staff, and player populations in England, none of that is true.
This is evident in any attempt to quantify the strength of a particular league. Analyst Tyson Ni recently published a set of publicly available team rankings that uses betting market odds to estimate the strength of the teams. The rankings are represented as the expected goal difference for a given team if they were to play against the worst team in the dataset. And, according to Ni’s rankings, the averages of the five major leagues are as follows:
Premier League: “2.51”
LaLiga: “2.24”
Serie A: “2.06”
Ligue 1: “2.01”
Bundesliga: “1.96”
In other words, the average Premier League team is expected to defeat the average LaLiga team by 0.27 goals, the average Serie A team by 0.45 goals, the average Ligue 1 team by 0.50 goals, and the average Bundesliga team by 0.55 goals.
Club Elo rankings, meanwhile, closely reflect salary and transfer value data. The Elo system awards or subtracts points after each match a team plays, based on the final result, location, and quality of the opponent. It is based purely on results; there are no estimations. And currently, all 20 Premier League clubs are among the top 50 in Europe, which includes teams beyond the big five leagues. No other league even has 10 clubs in the top 50.
What makes the Premier League so difficult?
The simple answer is that the players are better, and therefore, the teams are better.
While in LaLiga you would have a lot of difficult matches against the two traditional powerhouses and teams like Atlético de Madrid, Villarreal and Athletic Club, the Premier League presents you with 38 matches against teams among the top 50 in the world. The goalkeepers are better at stopping shots, the defenders are better at defending, the midfielders are better at breaking up attacks and maintaining ball possession, and the attackers are more difficult to stop.
Using one of the most complete player valuation models, VAEP (Valuation of Actions by Estimating Probabilities), which essentially judges everything a player does with the ball based on how much it increases their team’s chances of scoring or decreases the chances of conceding a goal, analyst Tony ElHabr analyzed how the performance of players changed when they switched leagues. In short: did their VAEP go up or down?
He studied the seasons from 2012 to 2020. And he discovered that when players moved to the Premier League from any of the five major leagues, their performance decreased. LaLiga players suffered a 5% decrease, while players from Ligue 1 fell by 10% and those from Serie A fell by 12%. The biggest drop in the big five, however, occurred when players moved from the Bundesliga: a 17% drop, greater than that of players from Portugal and Brazil, and approximately equivalent to what happened when players made the jump from the Championship.
But, how does this manifest itself on the field? At least last season, the Premier League stood out in a couple of aspects. Compared to the other five major leagues, Premier League teams were more urgent in possession (measured by passes per shot) and crossed the ball much less frequently (measured by the percentage of passes in the final third that were crosses).
Except that Premier League teams also took the lowest percentage of shots from outside the area and played the second shortest average passes. This was not a league where teams launched the ball up the field and shot from distance. No, it’s a league where the average team can advance possession with more intricate passes and then quickly move the ball into the area to shoot without having to rely on crosses.
That demands a high level of technical skill from the players in possession, but it also demands a lot from the players without possession.
Despite those more efficient possession numbers, Premier League teams didn’t score more goals or create better chances than others. To defend in the Premier League, then, you have to defend the stress created by the shorter, more aggressive passing approach in the build-up play and then you have to deal with teams that don’t cross or shoot from distance, but instead work the ball into the penalty area, where defensive errors become almost automatic goals.
The smartest decision-making and the shortest passes would not have been two phrases that anyone would have connected with the Premier League in 2010-11. The league has changed drastically, as some of the best coaches from outside the country have helped transform tactics.
At the same time, the Premier League has not lost the only thing it has always had: the race.
According to data from Gradient Sports, Premier League teams reach high-end speeds more often than any other league. Analyzing all outfield players who participated for at least 600 minutes last season, the average Premier League player reached a top speed of 32.5 kilometers per hour, almost a quarter of a kilometer per hour faster than any other league.
Gradient then defines a sprint as any moment when a player reaches 25 km/h or more. The Premier League leads in the number of sprints, the distance sprinted, the time spent sprinting, and the percentage of movement that was dedicated to sprinting:
Those differences may not seem like much, but when multiplied by 10 players, in 20 teams, each playing 38 games per season? The Premier League is sprinting in circles around the rest of Europe.
So, what does the Premier League get with all that extra money? And why does it make it so difficult for anyone coming from another league to succeed?
On the offensive end, you have to be able to maintain possession, pass through the opposition, and create chances within the most crowded area of the field without relying on a low-probability shot from outside the area or an inefficient cross from the wing. Without the ball, you have to try to break these sequences of possession in which bad decisions don’t save you and you need to constantly make plays within your penalty area.
And then, even if you can handle that, it’s still not enough. For all the technical skill, patience, and efficiency that the league requires, you still have to be able to run, faster and more often, than everyone else.
