Who’s going to win the Champions League? Anyone but you.
The truth is, even at this stage of the competition, with only 16 teams remaining, everyone is more likely to be eliminated at some point than to win the whole thing.
Wanna listen to the betting markets? Sportsbooks have Manchester City as the favorites, with odds somewhere around plus-170 — or significantly below 50%. Prefer a publicly available predictive model? How ’bout FiveThirtyEight? Well, they’ve got Bayern Munich as the favorites, with a whopping … 22% chance of winning the whole thing.
Pick a winner today and you’re probably gonna be wrong, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. As we’ve done in previous years, we’re gonna take a look at the statistical profiles (in domestic play) of the past 10 winners to create a kind of baseline profile for what’s been required to win the Champions League. While it may not lead us to the winner — last year’s picks were Bayern Munich and, um, Ajax? — the exercise should at least give us a sense of who looks the part, who doesn’t, and what, potentially, might prevent some of the favorites from going all the way.
Before we get to it, a word of apology to Benfica, Porto and Club Brugge. A team from outside the Big Five leagues hasn’t even reached the Champions League final since 2004. After being too enchanted by Ajax’s artificial domestic excellence last season, we are eliminating all non-Big Five teams until one of them gives us a reason not to. Now, onto the remaining 13 …
Unless otherwise noted, all data is courtesy of Stats Perform. Everything is up to date through Feb. 10.
Measurement No. 1: scoring goals
The average winner of the previous 10 Champions League titles has scored 2.6 goals per game in league play, which stretches out to about 99 goals over a 38-game season. However, the worst attack we’ve seen win this thing came in 2021 with Thomas Tuchel’s Chelsea. They scored 1.5 goals per game — just 57 across the entire domestic season.
Think of all of the excellent Chelsea teams we’ve seen over the years, and you’re probably not thinking of either of the Chelsea teams that won the Champions League. In 2012, they finished sixth domestically, and in 2021, they finished fourth — just one point clear of Leicester City in fifth. The best team in Europe rarely wins the Champions League; that’s absurd, and it’s also what makes this competition so compelling.
As for this season’s competitors, only one team doesn’t reach the goal-scoring threshold, and that’s … drumroll please … Chelsea! The Todd Boehly Project is currently averaging one goal per game. And while, yes, goal-scoring can still be pretty noisy at this point in the season, Chelsea are only averaging a slightly better mark of 1.2 expected goals per game. Sorry, guys.
Teams eliminated: Chelsea
Teams remaining: Bayern Munich, Manchester City, Real Madrid, Napoli, PSG, Liverpool, Tottenham, RB Leipzig, Inter Milan, Borussia Dortmund, Eintracht Frankfurt, AC Milan
Measurement No. 2: preventing goals
The spread here is a little tighter, simply because good teams concede significantly fewer goals than they score. Perhaps one day we will be introduced to a good team that doesn’t do that — and Real Madrid definitely gave the concept of “you need to outscore your opponents in order to win soccer games” a run for its money last season — but the basic tenets of mathematics still tell me that it’s impossible.
Over the past 10 years, the average winner has conceded 0.9 goals per game, but Real Madrid proved in 2017-18 (when they finished third in their own league) that you could concede 1.2 goals per game and still become the champions of Europe. That year’s final was one of my favorites — not because of the bizarre, terrible, unfortunate game — but because of the sheer ridiculousness of the third-best team in Spain and the fourth-best team in England (Liverpool) battling it out to be crowned the best team in Europe.
This season has to be one of the weakest defensive fields we’ve seen in a long time. Part of it is because many of the best teams in Europe — Barcelona, Arsenal, and yes, Newcastle — are not in the competition, but that’s still not enough to explain why six different teams in the round of 16 are conceding 1.3 goals or more per game in domestic play. We say goodbye to three of the four German sides — RB Leipzig (1.3), Dortmund (1.4) and Eintracht Frankfurt (1.4) — two of the three remaining English clubs, Liverpool (1.4) and Tottenham (1.4), and AC Milan (1.4).
Of those teams, Leipzig (1.1), Milan (1.1) and Spurs (1.2) have xG conceded numbers that get them just barely in line with the minimum goals conceded threshold, so if any of them end up winning the whole thing, I will point back to that fact and claim that I was actually right.
Teams eliminated: RB Leipzig, Borussia Dortmund, Eintracht Frankfurt, Liverpool, Tottenham, AC Milan
Teams remaining: Bayern Munich, Manchester City, Real Madrid, Napoli, PSG, Inter Milan
Measurement No. 3: field control
For all the different styles it seems like we’ve seen win the Champions League, all of the winners have spent significantly more time in the final third than their opponents. The average field tilt (think possession, but adjusted to only account for the final third) of the past 10 winners was 63.8%. The low comes from Real Madrid in 2016-17, when they controlled 56.5% of the final-third passes in their matches.
Of the remaining sides, only Inter Milan fail to meet that criteria, as they’ve produced a field-tilt of 54.3% this season — lower than all but three (Tottenham, Milan, and Frankfurt) of the Big Five teams in the round of 16. Inter came into the season as Serie A favorites, but they’re a distant 13 points back of Napoli. The biggest reason for their disappointing campaign? Their inability to keep the ball at the other end of the field.
Teams eliminated: Inter Milan
Teams remaining: Bayern Munich, Manchester City, Real Madrid, Napoli, PSG
Measurement No. 4: pressing
In order to produce the kind of goal and field-control profiles of a Champions League winner, you have to at least be somewhat proficient at breaking up opposition play. While there are different ways to go about it, all the teams that win the Champions League score a lot more goals than they concede by keeping the ball away from their penalty area and keeping it up near the opposition penalty area. That’s not possible if you can’t win the ball back after you lose it.
One way to measure a team’s proficiency in pressing is just to look at the opposition’s completion percentage. The previous 10 winners have allowed their opponents to complete just 78.2% of their passes. For context: teams across the Big Five leagues are completing 81% of their passes this season.
However, Real Madrid allowed their opponents to complete 83% of their passes last campaign. In fact, the four most recent Madrid champions are also the only four teams among the previous 10 winners to allow an opponent completion percentage of 80% or more.
Perhaps pressing is overrated? Well, Madrid and Paris Saint-Germain better hope so. Among all the remaining teams, they allow the two highest opposition completion percentages: PSG at 84.9% and Madrid at 84.1%.
Intriguingly, PSG’s round-of-16 opponent, Bayern Munich, allow the lowest pass-completion percentage of anyone in the field (73.3%), while Liverpool, Madrid’s round-of-16 opponents, are the second-toughest team to pass against (76.4%). While both sides could easily win those matchups, we haven’t seen a team as passive without the ball as PSG or Madrid win a European Cup in a long time.
Teams eliminated: Real Madrid, PSG
Teams remaining: Bayern Munich, Manchester City, Napoli
Measurement No. 5: pace
When City signed Erling Haaland over the summer, I wondered if it might be some kind of capitulation to the context of the Champions League. The absurd level of control City could exert in the Premier League was quite clearly the best way to conquer a 38-game season, but the acquisition of a goals-only center forward who flourishes in space, and at speed, seemed to suggest that City realized they couldn’t control the Champions League in the same way. Against better competition and across so few matches, they realized that the way to win the whole thing might be to concede some of the ball in exchange for some space for Haaland to break into.
Or not. Instead, they’ve gone in the other direction.
In the Premier League this season, City are moving the ball up-field, on average, at a pace of 0.97 meters per second, which is the slowest mark of the Pep Guardiola era. The average among the previous 10 winners is 1.49 meters per second, with the high coming from Madrid in 2013-14 (1.92) and the low being set by Chelsea in 2020-21 (1.15).
There’s going to be at least one stretch of play where City lose control of a game. Can they overcome it? Or, like we’ve seen in each of the previous six seasons, will their inability to withstand chaos be what ultimately does them in?
Teams eliminated: Manchester City
Teams remaining: Bayern Munich, Napoli
Measurement No. 6: set pieces
You have to score goals at an above average rate — and prevent them just as well. You have to be able to keep the ball in the opposition’s defensive third. You have to be able to break up play. And you have to be able to move the ball up-field at pace. Basically, to win the Champions League, you need to be able to dominate matches, but you also need to be able to hang tough in the periods where you’re not dominating matches.
But even that’s not quite enough. The team that wins the Champions League rarely wins based purely off its ability to dominate the game in open play. The structure of the tournament is too random and the competition is too difficult for you to just ride some beautiful passing and high-octane pressing all the way to the European Cup.
You also need to be able to find a couple of goals outside the flow of the match.
Maybe it’s an early set piece goal against a more talented opponent that causes them to have to push forward and makes it easier for you to score a second. Maybe it’s a second-half corner that salvages a result during a tricky away leg. Or maybe it’s a well-executed set piece routine that tips the scales in an otherwise 50-50 match.
The previous 10 winners of the Champions League all created at least 0.29 xG from set pieces per game. And that low mark was set by the 2014-15 Barcelona side that had Lionel Messi, Neymar and Luis Suarez, all basically at their peaks. No one in this year’s field has anything remotely approaching that level of attacking talent.
The average winner, meanwhile, created 0.34 xG from set pieces per game. For some context, that would be the 18th-best per-game mark among any player in the Premier League this season. The teams that have won the European Cup, then, have essentially added a top-20 Premier League attacker to their already-stellar starting XIs via set pieces.
Bayern Munich, however, are not doing that this season. In fact, among the teams analyzed in this piece, only Chelsea have been less threatening on set pieces than Bayern, who have created just 0.23 xG per game from dead-ball situations.
Napoli, meanwhile, are creating 0.35 xG per match via set pieces — more than the average of the previous 10 winners. And of course, they’re hitting every other benchmark, too. Luciano Spalletti & Co. seemed like they were going to have to cool down at some point — after all, nobody expected this, did they? — but they’ve just continued to dominate, week after week. Strip away the name, and Napoli have a statistical profile that seriously stands up to some of the great European sides of the past decade.
As my colleague Bill Connelly pointed out, the only real question mark comes with their strength of schedule. Serie A is weak this year, and Napoli lost to Inter, the second-best team in the league, last month. They beat Liverpool 4-1 … but, well, Liverpool are currently a mid-table team, and Liverpool did beat them 2-0 in the second matchup.
Maybe, in future versions of this exercise, we’ll have to ding Italian teams for the quality of the league, but for now, the following statement, incredibly, stands true: It’s February, and Napoli look more like a European champion than anyone else in the world.
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