The Europa League Penalty

Like most fans of the Premier League, I watched dumbfounded this season as Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur flailed through two achievements that don't normally go together. The first and more prestigious is reaching the Europa League final, but the second was doing that while being the two worst teams in the English top flight that didn't get relegated.

Watching them play against one another on Wednesday, 21 May, made me think again about the long-held tradition that playing Europa League matches on Thursdays drags a team's league performance down. It's usually blamed on the shorter rest time compared to teams in the Champions League (which is on Tuesdays and Wednesdays), or on the fact that the travels to away matches are longer - there are more Eastern European teams in the Europa League, so you might find yourself drawn against a side from Kazakhstan and effectively be playing in Asia.

Another possibility was that because the teams that usually play in the Europa League aren't as rich as the Champions League teams, they might have less chance to rotate out players who are as good as their normal starters. It's also fairly common for some clubs de-prioritize the Europa League or domestic cups by fielding academy teams (Arsenal used to do this quite a bit with the EFL Cup, if I recall).

In any case, as I always do when I have a question like this, I built a spreadsheet to see what the numbers suggested. I took the English Premier League teams that have participated in the Europa League in the past 10 seasons and calculated their average points per game in the Premier League for each of those seasons. I then compared their averages in seasons when they were in the Europa League with seasons when they weren't. I also included participation in the more recent Europa Conference league, because those games are also played on Thursdays. Once I had the average points per season and points per game in UEL (UEFA Europa League) and non-UEL seasons, I calculated the averages across all the teams.

There are 13 teams in total, but not all of them have point totals/averages for every season, because some were relegated from the Premier League during that 10-year period. Frankly, those relegation seasons tended to come with such low point-totals that they may have skewed the numbers a bit. At the other end of the scale, a number of teams (Leicester City, Chelsea and Liverpool) have won the Premier League at least once in the same period, which presumably also skews the numbers.

In the end, I can report that there doesn't appear to be a UEL penalty, at least in the years I'm looking at. Average points per game across all 13 teams was 1.5, regardless of whether they competed in the Europa League or not. If you add one decimal place, UEL seasons on average had 1.53 points per game, while non-UEL seasons had 1.48. With regard to total points per season, the 13 teams accrued an average of 58.1 points per season that they played the Thursday games, against 56.3 points for the seasons where they didn't.

That's right: playing in the Europa League was associated with better league form.

I don't need to tell you that correlation doesn't equal causation, so I'm not saying that playing in the Europa League made the teams have better seasons. But I also don't observe clear drop-offs in points during the seasons where the teams did participate.

To take one example, Burnley's single Europa League season (2018-19) saw them reach 40 points, or 1.1 points per game. In the season right before and the season right after, they earned 54 total (1.4 per game), but two seasons before playing in Europe, Burnley had also racked up just 40 points during the season. Two seasons after playing in Europe they picked up just 39 in total (a little over 1.0 per game), and then the season after that were relegated after getting 35 points, or 0.9 per game.

Wolves make for another interesting example. Like Burnley, they played in the Europa League just once during this period (2019-20), but that season they ended up earning their highest points tally since getting promoted back to the Premier League, with 59 (1.6 per game). The season before, which was their first in the top flight, they earned 57 points, or 1.5 per game, and the season after they got just 45 points, or 1.2 points per game. In every subsequent season Wolves have earned between 1.3 and 1.1 points per game, and have not played in Europe.

The bigger teams fared a little worse. In seasons where they didn't play the Thursday games, the representatives of the so-called Big Six accrued an average of 1.9 points per game, compared with 1.8 points per game where they did play in the Europa League. Also FYI, the teams included in those numbers are Manchester United, Spurs, Liverpool, Arsenal and Chelsea; Manchester City was the only Big Six team not to play in the Europa League during this period.

Liverpool suffered the biggest drop, going from 2.2 points per game in non-UEL seasons, as against 1.9 in UEL seasons. This result is skewed by the fact that Liverpool played just three UEL seasons, of which one (2015-16) represented their lowest points-per-game average during this decade; in among the non-UEL seasons are the two seasons where they won 2.6 points per game (2018-19 and 2019-20, the latter of which they won the league). Liverpool's most recent UEL season (2023-24) saw them get 2.2 points per game, but this season, where they won the league they got 2.3.

Arsenal also suffered a drop in UEL seasons, registering 1.8 points per game vs 2.0 in non-UEL seasons, and Tottenham's UEL points per game are 1.7 vs 1.8 for non-UEL seasons. Manchester United's points per game are the same across the decade (reflecting the years of drift post-Alex Ferguson), while Chelsea actually sees better points per game in UEL seasons (1.9) as against non-UEL seasons (1.7).

So what accounts for the discrepancies, both in the general sample and in the Big Six teams?

For the smaller teams, points totals and points-per-game may be skewed by the presence of historically bad seasons in which they got relegated. Southampton, Burnley, Leicester and Aston Villa each suffered at least one relegation in this period, and of those, Southampton, Burnley and Leicester managed to get relegated twice. Southampton's first relegation season of the period saw them net 25 points across the season (0.7 per game), and their second, which was this season, got them 12 points (0.3 per game), which is the second-lowest points total in Premier League history. Villa's relegation in 2015-16 saw them earn a pretty dismal 17 points overall or 0.4 per game.

And while none of the big teams got relegated in this period, they did have a few stinkers. Chelsea amassed just 44 points, or 1.2 per game, in 2022-23, as they recovered from the forced sale from former owner Roman Abramovich in response to the Ukraine war. But Manchester United and Spurs have them beat this season, with 42 and 38 points overall, respectively, or 1.1 and 1.0 points per game. 

The big teams skewed things in the other direction, by the way, mainly by having really good seasons. Leicester, Chelsea and Liverpool all won the title during these years (Liverpool twice), which suggests some good points totals, but even when they didn't win some of the big teams racked up good points totals. There were seven seasons in which a team amassed over 80 points without winning the league, and four of those were non-UEL seasons. All of the four times that a team won over 90 points (Liverpool in 2018-19, 2019-20 and 2021-22, Chelsea in 2016-17) were non-UEL seasons for those teams.

Coming back to the original question, it seems clear that their extended runs in the Europa League aren't sufficient to explain Manchester United or Spurs' low points totals this season. A more likely explanation for both is severe injury crises, where a great many key players were unavailable for large parts of the season. The other problem, though less quantifiable, is the dysfunction in the backrooms of both clubs: Spurs are run by Daniel Levy, who tends to be quick to sack managers but reluctant to buy players, while Manchester United is in the middle of a decade-long quagmire relating to servicing their primary owners' debt incurred in buying them, plus a new minority owner who seems even less inclined to spend than the majority owners. United's dysfunction has extended to selling off a load of players who promptly pull up trees at their next clubs, which implies that morale and management are both in the dumps.

This is all to say that, while the achievement of contesting a major European trophy puts at least some lipstick on the pig that the 2024-25 season has represented for both clubs, Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur need to look to other factors to explain this year's dismal form. While they may do marginally worse in seasons where they play in the Europa League, they won't have this excuse next season. 

But at least Spurs can look forward to playing in the Champions League. Hopefully they strengthen the team enough for it.