The team that finishes fifth in the Premier League this season will qualify for the 2027/28 Champions League. A bit premature surely? Not really. As a reminder, from the 2023/24 season onwards the Champions League was expanded from 32 to 36 clubs. Instead of eight groups of four with the top two in each going through to the knockout stages, it changed to a Swiss League format where all 36 clubs in the Champions League would play eight different teams, four at home and four away. The top eight would automatically qualify for the knockout stages, whilst the 16 clubs finishing between 9th and 24th in the Swiss League stage would have home and away two-legged play-offs to decide the other eight to go through. Back though to the change in how certain clubs would qualify for the Champions League competition at all each season.
The expansion to 36 clubs in the Champions League saw two of the extra new places go to domestic leagues whose clubs collectively performed best across the three European competitions the season before. So far in the three seasons this has been in place, the extra Champions League places have been shared between Spain (2), England (2), Germany (1) and Italy (1). This doesn’t though tell the full story. Quite clearly these extra bonus places were aimed at a very small number of leagues, an extra sop to them.
Most leagues haven’t got any chance of securing one of the bonus Champions League places. France maybe an outside chance sometimes but even they are so unlikely due to the weak state of their league now generally when it comes to finances. Thanks to the huge amounts of money pumped in by Qatar over so many years, PSG are an anomaly in their country. Such a financial advantage they are all but guaranteed to win Ligue 1 every season, yet even with them winning the Champions League in both 2024/25 and 2025/26, the French clubs collectively only finished fifth and then sixth highest in the UEFA co-efficients these past two seasons compared to the other European leagues. Then when it comes to what has been a very even split between the main four strongest leagues, two bonus Champions League spots so far for Spain and England, one each for Italy and Germany, that masks the true reality. The Premier League missing out on a bonus Champions League place for the 2024/25 season won’t happen again for the foreseeable, unless the English clubs massively fail collectively. Fail to match their collective European performances to the huge financial advantage they have over every other league.
The summer 2026 window saw Premier League clubs spend over £1billion more on new signings than all of the other four major European leagues combined! These are the top three European leagues when it came to their collective club performances each season, the top two of the three getting a bonus Champions League place (the collective co-efficient detailed for each league’s clubs):
2025/26: England 28.680, Spain 22.093, Germany 21.785
2024/25: England 29.464, Spain 23.892, Italy 21.875
2023/24: Italy 21.000, Germany 19.357, England 17.375
As you can see, the last two seasons have ended up with the Premier League clubs a crazy amount ahead of the rest. In 2023/24 it was simply the exception that proved the rule. Pretty much everything that could go wrong did go wrong for English clubs when competing in European competitions and even then they were a close third. It is when you look at previous seasons you get a better context.
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When you add in the previous seven seasons to make it a bigger sample, England finished in the top places eight of the last ten times in terms of co-efficient compared to the other European leagues. Indeed, after finishing second top in 2016/17, these last nine seasons have seen England at the very top on seven occasions. It was 2019/20 the other time the Premier League finished outside the top two and that was another close third. Since 2019/20 though, the financial gap between the Premier League clubs and the other leagues has grown massively further.
Also, the introduction of the Conference League in 2021 and the changes in 2023 to the formats of the Champions League and Europa League have further increased the likelihood of Premier League clubs collectively succeeding. More games guaranteed in the top two competitions means far less chance of an early knockout and more co-efficient points to be banked as well, whilst the fact four more clubs now qualify for the Champions League AND no longer the teams that finish third in Champions League groups drop into the Europa League, gives the English clubs that qualify for the Europa League an incredible chance of winning the trophy. Man U and Tottenham were battling it out for fourth bottom of the Premier League in the 2024/25 season and yet they both got to the final of the Europa League final.
Forest were fighting relegation last season and yet only failed to reach the Europa League final because eventual winners Aston Villa knocked them out in the semis. Everything is loaded in favour of Premier League clubs these days, especially when as well clubs from the same country can’t face each other in the Swiss League stage of the Champions League and Europa League. As for the Conference League, this was supposed to be a UEFA initiative to give clubs in lower ranking leagues a chance of European glory. The reality has been somewhat different. The Premier League only gets one spot in the Conference League but that one team is almost always the favourite to win it. The last four seasons have seen West Ham, Chelsea and Palace win it, whilst Aston Villa lost in a semi-final to eventual winners Olympiakos. Brighton are a shirt-priced favourite to win it this season.
The Seagulls though aren’t as nailed on as the Premier League will be to get a bonus Champions League place once again for the 2027/28 season. Not sure if there are odds offered on which leagues will get the bonus Champions League places but if there are, the Premier League will be priced prohibitively short.
The Champions League kicked off this week, five Premier League clubs in action and five wins. That fifth place in the 2026/27 Premier League season will for sure guarantee Champions League football next season.
