The vibes are strange throughout the top of European soccer at the moment. The top teams in both the Premier League (Arsenal) and LaLiga (Barcelona) either didn’t qualify or didn’t advance to the Champions League knockout rounds, which begin just a week from now, and none of the actual favorites in the field are in particularly good form.
Since play resumed after the World Cup, Manchester City, the betting favorite, lost for the third time in six games and has lost to Southampton and drawn with Everton. The No. 2 favorite, Bayern Munich, briefly forgot how to score and just won its first league match in four tries. The No. 3 favorite, PSG, has dropped two of its past four league road games. The No. 4 favorite, Liverpool, has won one of its past seven matches in all competitions.
Be it post-World Cup fatigue or pure happenstance, things are pretty screwy. That could make for some fascinating round-of-16 results. But no matter how these next few weeks go, at least City (barring fast-moving sanctions, anyway https://www.espn.com/soccer/soccer-transfers/story/4870556/man-city-charged-over-multiple-ffp-breaches), Bayern and PSG are all but assured of playing in next year’s Champions League. Liverpool? Chelsea (the No. 7 favorite)? Not so much.
Of the 32 teams that qualified for this year’s Champions League group stage, 19 were from Europe’s Big Five leagues: five from the Bundesliga (which snared an extra bid with Eintracht Frankfurt‘s Europa League win), four from the Premier League, LaLiga and Serie A and two from Ligue 1. Of those 19, FiveThirtyEight’s SPI ratings project six of them — Bayern, Barcelona, Real Madrid, Napoli, PSG and Manchester City — with at least a 98% chance of making next year’s field. Four more are at 70% or higher (Inter Milan, RB Leipzig, Borussia Dortmund, Marseille) and three are all but hopeless at 2% or lower (Bayer Leverkusen, Juventus, Sevilla).
That leaves six teams in between, including 2022’s Champions League runner up (Liverpool), 2021’s champion (Chelsea) and the defending Serie A champion (AC Milan). As we get ready to put our continental hats back on and dive into Europe’s biggest club competition, let’s talk about these six uncertain clubs and the varying levels of panic each should be feeling at the moment.
(Note: Teams are listed in order from worst odds to best. And in terms of panic, 1 means “we’re relaxed” and 5 is equivalent to “red alert.”)
Chelsea
– Current position: ninth in the Premier League (10 points outside the top four) – Odds of reaching next year’s Champions League, per 538: 5% to finish in the top four, 5% to win this year’s Champions League – Results since restart: two wins, three draws and three losses in all competitions (1.1 points per game)
In college football, we talk a lot about “winning the offseason.” Did you recruit well? Did your new starting quarterback look good in spring ball? Did you avoid any silly suspensions or attrition in the dull summer months?
In some ways, the soccer version of this is winning the transfer windows, and Chelsea certainly did that. Back in the summer as the new ownership team led by Todd Boehly looked to make a splash, the Blues spent more than €280 million in transfer fees to bring in eight players, including veterans Raheem Sterling (from Manchester City), Kalidou Koulibaly (Napoli) and, for some reason, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang (Barcelona), plus burgeoning young stars like Wesley Fofana (Leicester City) and Marc Cucurella (Brighton). A lot of these acquisitions came about with guidance from manager Thomas Tuchel … who was fired quickly after the summer transfer window closed.
Even in a free-spending Premier League, their moves stood out… and that was before a maniacal January, in which they added seven more transfers, all 22 or younger — including big-time prospects like Enzo Fernandez (Benfica) and Mykhaylo Mudryk (Shakhtar Donetsk) — for nearly €330 million more. They even brought in disgruntled Atletico Madrid striker Joao Felix on loan for good measure.
That’s more than €600 million in transfers since June, plus the second-highest payroll in the Premier League, per Spotrac. Congrats for winning the windows, Chelsea. You’ve earned many headlines for it.
Winning matches, however, has been a bit trickier, be it under Tuchel or replacement Graham Potter. When you spend more than half a billion Euros on transfer fees in a single season, you’d like to get something out of it in the short term, right? The only thing that Chelsea’s gotten is worse.
