SUMMARY
- The Premier League and the UEFA Champions League are the two biggest club competitions in the world.
- The UCL is very revered in the soccer community due to having the best clubs in the world.
The Premier League and the UEFA Champions League are two of the most prestigious events in the soccer world. The two competitions comprise some of the most elite players in the world. Soccer in the PL and the UCL is of the highest grade, with the perfect mixture of physicality and technicality. As the flagbearers of club soccer, many aspiring soccer players dream of playing in the Champions League and the Premier League someday.
“EPL is more difficult to win than UCL” https://t.co/j1HL6jgoJf
— 🫵🏽 (@Timi_tx) March 22, 2023
However, the soccer fans seem divided on the competitiveness of the two leagues. While some believe it is more difficult to win the Premier League, on the other hand, some have praised the Champions League for its sheer unpredictability. Certainly, this invites some analysis that establishes the supremacy of one competition over another.
What makes the Champions League so special?
To compare both the UCL and the PL, it is very important to see how the former has established itself as the most elite continental competition for clubs. The Champions League has been in existence since 1955 but has risen to prominence since 1992 when the provision of groups was introduced.
The fans love the UCL because it truly consists of one of the best clubs in Europe. Leagues across Europe get a set number of berths to send teams for the competition, which depends upon the individual league’s coefficients.
And this is what makes the competition so competitive. In the Champions League, there is rarely a weakling, as every other club is one of the best in their leagues. It is best versus the best in the Champions League, which provides us with some incredible games.
The UEFA Champions League gets even more interesting when the competition progresses into knockouts. The greatest European clubs in a season then compete in knockout games that consist of two legs-home and away.
The knockout games test the players to their physical and mental extremes. The players need to be ready to run the full length of the pitch for the entire 90 minutes for two competitive games in the span of a week. The team that scores the most goals at the end of the two legs advances into the next round.
The UCL knockouts also carry the possibility of extra time and a penalty shootout, which adds to the unpredictability and suspense of the competition. There is another additional advantage of the knockout stages of the UCL, which is that they favor certain small teams.
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Clubs with depleted squads also have a shot at progressing deep in the tournament if they can win at least one leg and protect their lead in the other leg. Therefore, the UEFA Champions League has better prospects for a fairytale journey, as exemplified by Porto in the 2003/04 season and AFC Ajax in the 2018/19 season.
The UEFA Champions League also provides a better experience to the fans who have to travel miles to support their favorite clubs. These sets of fans travel to many European cities in a year and begin chanting the hymns of their clubs in their rivals’ cities days before the tie.
The fans visit various nations, where they encounter different cultures and customs. In this way, the Champions League has unknowingly worked towards strengthening harmony between different sets of soccer fans. The UEFA Champions League thus bears both sporting and social importance in the context of Europe.
Clubs need to be very consistent to win the Premier League
However, there is a principal fact that makes the Premier League more difficult to win. The teams in the PL are always walking on a thin line, meaning they have little chance of losing focus on the title.
A typical Premier League season consists of 38 games for each club. The clubs that have a shot at the title have had to go all guns blazing since matchday. Clubs like Manchester City, Liverpool, Arsenal, etc. cannot afford to lose points on any matchday due to the sheer competitiveness of the league. These clubs feel threatened, as their competitors might pounce on the opportunity if one of them drops points.
Is this the greatest title race we’ve ever seen? 🤩 pic.twitter.com/hn1uNuOxnF
— Premier League (@premierleague) March 3, 2024
In a matter of weeks, a club’s destiny for the season might change. Title challengers may become midtable clubs, and those who were looking to secure European qualification might find themselves fighting relegation.
The highly profitable Premier League’s unpredictability lasts throughout the season. Besides the sporting aspect, the clubs also have to take care of the overall fitness of the players. It is a very daunting task to stay fit enough to be able to play eight months a year.
The UEFA Champions, with all their glory and fantastic format, is nothing but a show of moments. The majority of the clubs that perform well in the tournament just perform exceptionally well at certain intervals in the tournament, which helps them progress deeply.
A case can be made for Real Madrid in the 22/23 season, where the club lifted the UCL after a series of comebacks. Several pundits had reckoned that even after being the champions of Europe, Real Madrid weren’t actually the best team throughout the tournament.
However, in order to win the Premier League, a team cannot be good enough in certain moments, but throughout the entire campaign. The margin of error is much higher in England’s first division, which is exemplified better in some of the past few years’ title races.
Liverpool have twice finished second to Manchester City in the last five seasons by only one point. This means that every point matters in the Premier League. While in the UCL, a team can finish runners-up in their group but still win the trophy altogether in the end.
Moreover, the UCL has more clear favorites than the Premier League. Apart from the recent dominance of Manchester City, every other Premier League season had a different Champion. Even the top 4 of the PL changes every season due to the heavy competition in the league.
Legendary managers have concurred that winning the league is more difficult than the UCL
Pep Guardiola in his book, ‘Pep Confidential’ released in 2014 wrote (via Tribuna), “League titles are won in the last eight games, but are lost in the first eight.”
This quote certainly proves the competitiveness of the league, which matters so much in how a team begins and finishes the tournament. However, a team in a UCL can finish the tournament successfully, even if its performances are more or less decent in the group stages.
The former FC Barcelona manager has himself said that winning the Premier League is much more difficult than winning the Champions League. He declared in 2018 (via The Guardian), “It (PL) is every three days for our side and everybody else. It is the most difficult thing. The Champions League is seven games and, with one bad game, you are out. In the league every game you have to stay there.”
Zinedine Zidane won the Champions League 3-peat before his 5th defeat in Europe. pic.twitter.com/8aBhqoPxZO
— TC (@totalcristiano) February 23, 2023
His quotes about the difficulty of the Premier League bear more significance when we remember that Pep Guardiola is a manager who has won three UCLs and the Premier League title five times. Even Zinedine Zidane, who oversaw arguably the greatest UCL run in the history of the competition, the famous Real Madrid UCL three-peat of 15/16 to 17/18, looks to agree with Pep’s comments.
Zidane, however, hasn’t managed in the Premier League and has therefore compared La Liga with the UCL. The Frenchman said, “For me, I repeat, the most important is La Liga, the most difficult. In the [UEFA Champions League] you have 12 games, in La Liga 38 weeks.” He highlighted that in order to be the Champions of Spain, his side needed to be the best throughout the season, not just in a few games.
🗣 The Legend, Leo Messi in 2019: “We won 8 League titles in 11 years! We do not give it the value it deserves but over the years we will see how difficult it was.” pic.twitter.com/ngLKr6VCOr
— Select FCB (@SelectFCB) January 29, 2024
Lionel Messi has also highlighted the importance of league soccer over the UCL. He said ahead of the Joan Gamper Trophy of 2019, “We won 8 League titles in 11 years! We do not give it the value it deserves but over the years we will see how difficult it was.”
The legends and our opinion prove that indeed, league soccer is more difficult to dominate than knockout soccer. However, the readers need to understand the fact that it is the format of the competition that is making UCL less competitive.
Even UEFA has understood this problem and is changing the format for the 24/25 season. It would be interesting to see if UCL becomes more difficult to win than the Premier League after the format change.
