Is the English Premier League really the best football league in the world? — Part 1
I should perhaps start this story by unequivocally stating that I am a fan of the English Premier League (EPL). In fact, some of my earliest memories associated with football-watching are those of Ian Rush scoring the goals for Liverpool (and he had this fantastic mo!) and Dennis Wise (of Chelsea, in case you did not know) picking up fights every other day (aside: I used to dislike him then and it wasn’t until I had learned to appreciate a certaing tenacious midfielder named Gennaro Gattuso that I realized how important Wise was). Anyways, that is not what this ‘story’ is about. Most fans of the sport I know almost exclusively watch the EPL. I was talking about the sport with an acquaintance recently. An acquaintance whose knowledge of the sport was based on popular chatter. Rather unsurprisingly, the said acquaintance was astounded when I suggested that EPL may not be the best league in the world. In the acquaintance’s mind, based on what he/she had heard, EPL was the only important league. It did not take me long to figure out that all his/her communications regarding the sport had been with self-proclaimed football fans who followed the EPL and only watched that specific league (only when it is available in HD, of course; because football isn’t football unless the picture quality is right). I found myself with no option other than to quickly compile some shallow statistics on the subject (being a data scientist, it bothers me if/when people enlighten me with their non-data-centric viewpoints).
TLDR: I am writing this piece to show, via the use of some data-centric assessments, that EPL is not the best league in the world. Not only is it not by far the best league in the world (as some people claim/think), it is not #1 by most measures.
Let me start by pointing out unsubstantiated and non-data-centric information on the subject matter that the internet is full of. A quick search took me to this article [last accessed sometime in 2017] by this person called Andrew Spacey (I have nothing against the person. In fact, he seems to have some interesting analyses of poetry. However, the points he makes in the article are quite baseless and not supported by numbers). The article mentions nothing about the UEFA coefficients. So let’s start with that.
The UEFA coefficients.
In short: it is a ranking system used by UEFA to rank countries based on the performances of their clubs in Europe. As of August 2017, Spain is way ahead of any competition with 89.2 points. Is England 2nd? Is England close? No and No. Second is Germany, at 63.4. England is 3rd at 62.1 and very closely followed by Italy (61.9). If one talks to the typical EPL fan who watches no other football league (henceforth: EPL-only fan), the latter will surely confidently say that the Italian league is a depleted league and so on. It is rather strange that the coefficient for the country with apparently the best league in the world is not even statistically different to the coefficient of a country with a depleted league. Isn’t it? In a recent conversation with an EPL-only fan, I mentioned this, and the response I received is that the coefficients are flawed. So let’s not just look at these flawed coefficients. Let’s look at real numbers.
European Trophies


The figures show the distribution of Champions League (CL) and Europa League (EL) winners and runner-ups by country since 2017. We see that English teams have done better at being runners up, than champion. It also shows why Spain has such high UEFA coefficients. Their clubs have been consistently winning competitions. A common view (again, non-data-centric) that an EPL-only fan will present is that it is only two Spanish clubs (Real Madrid and Barcelona) that do all the winning. That is an incorrect statement. Sevilla won 4 ELs since 2007 and Atletico Madrid won 2. An English club has not beaten a Spanish club in any of the tournament finals presented here.
To conclude this part, let’s just say that at best EPL teams are a distant second in Europe. The so called second-tier teams in Spain such as Atletico Madrid and Sevilla (they aren’t actually second-tier by any means; in fact, they’d probably be winning the EPL every season if they were in that league. But let’s not get non-data-centric and hypothetical at this point) are actually doing much better than the EPL clubs in Europe.
The best league in the world necessarily must have the clubs that produce the best performance in international tournaments. The performances of EPL teams in Europe do not suggest that EPL is the best league.
Let’s get back to the article I previously cited. The author states that the competition for the EPL title is what sets it apart, with 6 teams fighting for the title. Is that really true? How many clubs have won the EPL since 2007? The answer is 4 and that includes Leicester City. Yes Leicester City had a great season and won the EPL, but could they have done it if they were say in the German league or Italian league? No (again, getting into hypotheticals). One interesting thing to note is that Leicester City won the title with 81 points! Anyone who knows anything about football will tell you that 81 points should not be enough to win a title. Was it because of tough competition or was it because of lack of consistency among the English teams? The following year’s CL clearly shows that it is the latter. The big guns of EPL showed similar levels of consistency (or the lack of it) in the EPL and the CL. Unsurprisingly, they didn’t go very far against the European challengers. Manchester City was sent home by Monaco and Arsenal was crushed 10-2 by Bayern Munich. The highlight of the tournament, from an EPL perspective, was the scrappy win Leicester City got over Sevilla. From a neutral point-of-view, it was a great achievement by a team that was clearly not good enough to go further in that tournament.
Getting back to the point made by the author of the article—that a larger number of teams play to win the EPL, which makes the league better. Is that then the only necessary condition to judge a league? In that case, A-League soccer (the Australian league—which I used to follow when I lived in Sydney) is better than the EPL. Any of the ten teams playing it can win it. Six teams have won it since 2007 (60% of the total number of teams) compared to four teams for the EPL (20%). So, the A-league must be better then?
Bottom teams
Last point I will make in this post (for now) is about the competitiveness of the leagues. On several occasions, EPL-only fans have suggested that EPL is better because the bottom teams in EPL do much better than the bottom teams in the other big leagues. There is this belief amongst EPL-only fans that the to-be-relegated clubs don’t really pose a challenge to the other teams in other European leagues. Number-wise, if that was true, the bottom three clubs in the other leagues would end up with less points, on average, than the EPL teams. Is that the case though? The following figure shows the average points obtained by the bottom three teams in EPL, La Liga and Serie A. The trend observed is similar to what the champions league coefficients suggested in the first place: lower teams in the Spanish league tend to get higher total points on average (i.e., they need more points to avoid relegation), compared to EPL and Serie A teams. Note that I left out Germany here because the German league has 18 teams playing (which, I think, is a great idea as it makes the games more interesting to watch and the league more competitive).

Other factors
So are there other factors that make EPL the best league? Or at least seem like the best league? How about attendance? According the KPMG Football Benchmark The German Bundesliga had an average attendance of 41,000 per game in the 16/17 season, 5,000 more than the EPL (average 36,000). La Liga has the third highest average at 28,000.
None of the factors I have mentioned in this post show any evidence that EPL is the best league in the world. It is not the first by any metric.
I will end my post here… for now. I will come back to it with more stats (when I have another sleepless night). Comments are welcome meanwhile.