Europe exits are the price of a strong Premier League
Liverpool, Manchester City, Arsenal and West Ham all exited European competitions last week, reflecting not a lack of talent but the unique demands of English football, writes Martin Hardy.
It was getting on for midnight local time in Bergamo, northern Italy, and in a room inside the Gewiss Stadium, Jurgen Klopp put a hand to his cheek, gave a bemused look and laughed. Game 52 of the season for Liverpool had not long finished. It was a 1-0 win against Atalanta in the second leg of the Europa League quarter-finals but a 3-1 defeat on aggregate and an exit from the competition. Klopp was out of Europe, for the last time as Liverpool manager.
Klopp, dressed in a red club tracksuit and cap, looked weary as he was asked whether at this time of the season, it is more about which team is the most exhausted than any sophisticated tactical plans. “The Premier League is the best league in the world, I have watched a lot of football and whatever other leagues say - Italy has improved, Spain is fantastic, Bundesliga is there - but the Premier League is the most intense league, definitely,” the 56-year-old German said.
“Besides [Aston] Villa [in the Europa Conference League], all the teams are out in the quarter-finals. Because of extra European games they are getting rid of FA Cup replays. It's just tricky but it's not my problem any more. It's my last European game and I'll watch it and hopefully not speak any more about these kind of things.”
He looked relieved. The problems of English football are no longer his to be concerned with.
Some context. Last week, Manchester City and Arsenal exited the Champions League. On Thursday, the FA, with the backing of the Premier League, announced that replays would be scrapped from the first round onwards in the FA Cup and that the final would be played before the end of the league season. That afternoon, the EFL alleged that it had not been included in discussions about the changes. That night, Liverpool and West Ham United went out of the Europa League. After a penalty shoot-out, Villa at least defeated Lille to stay in the Conference League, the third-tier competition. They are England's last men standing.
Not for the best part of a decade has England not had a club in the semi-finals of the Champions League or Europa League. That sort of statistic would usually start a significant amount of navel-gazing, about a deterioration of standards, about crisis, but not this time.
Firstly, look at the English clubs' defeats last week. Shoot-outs give no more an indication of the standard of the respective teams than the flip of a coin it replaced - Villa won theirs, City lost to Real Madrid. Pep Guardiola's team might even have won had two middle-aged City fans not decided that their desire to keep the ball - blasted into the crowd by Luka Modric after he missed from the spot - as a memento was more important than their
team's fortunes. Instead, Bernardo Silva waited 50 seconds for the ball, struck an awful penalty straight at Andriy Lunin, the momentum shifted and Real prevailed.
City were the better team against Real. They had more possession, more control, more shots and a younger, fitter Kevin De Bruyne would have scored the chance he spurned to win the tie.
Arsenal are still a young and inexperienced side at Champions League level. They need to learn. They also need a centre forward. This we already knew.
But losing 3-2 over two legs to a Bayern Munich side full of European pedigree hardly spells crisis.
Liverpool would always finish above Atalanta, their Europa League conquerors, in the Premier League. Xabi Alonso has been feted as the best manager in the world and his Bayer Leverkusen have not lost a game in any competition this season, but they were an 89th-minute equaliser away from doing just that in the second leg against a West Ham side with disgruntled fans and an unpopular manager.
The standard of English football in comparison to its European counterparts is not - as it once was - the concern. The real issue is that, as Klopp hinted, you cannot have everything.
You cannot have an intense Premier League with ten added minutes every match; games kicking off at all times of every day to suit a worldwide TV audience; the top clubs squeezing every penny possible in order to comply with financial rules; a traditional FA Cup with replays; a League Cup everyone takes seriously from the start; a healthy pyramid where nonLeague clubs are not crippled by fixture postponements in the winter; an England team that can win the Euros while maintaining the dominance of English club sides in the closing stages of European competitions. Something - or some things - have to give.
Soft-muscle injuries are at their highest level ever in the Premier League. The game is getting faster. Klopp is right, it is the best league. It does not have the best player, Kylian Mbappe, but it has the best teams and it has a stack of brilliant players.
With that in mind - does anyone care that the Premier League is not represented in the closing stages of European competitions?
It exhausts managers and it exhausts players and as a consequence, fatigued teams start losing games they otherwise would win come the business end.