Nine clubs, two competing calendars
For the second season running, nine Premier League clubs will play European football. Arsenal, Manchester City, Manchester United, Aston Villa and Liverpool go into the Champions League. Bournemouth, Sunderland and Crystal Palace are in the Europa League. Brighton reach the Conference League if they get past Tromso, having drawn the first leg of their play-off 0-0 in Norway.
The financial case is not in question. Arsenal banked well over 100 million pounds from their run to last season’s Champions League final, and the reshaped Europa and Conference League formats have made continental silverware more attainable for English clubs than at any point in recent memory, as Tottenham, Villa, West Ham and Palace have each found out.
The sporting case is messier. Opta data from the 2025-26 campaign points to a pattern that recurs often enough to be worth taking seriously.
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The teams who slid, and the ones who climbed
Chelsea, Newcastle and Nottingham Forest all played in Europe last season and all finished lower than the year before, by six, seven and nine places respectively. Chelsea ended up 10th. Newcastle landed in the bottom half for the first time since 2021-22. Forest flirted with relegation a year after finishing seventh. Tottenham held station in 17th, which was hardly the outcome they wanted either.
The two biggest climbers went the other way. Manchester United rose 12 places and Bournemouth three, and neither had a European fixture to prepare for. Both played 40 matches in all competitions, a Premier League low, and both had the longest average gap between games in the division.
Rest and travel track the table closely. After Arsenal and City, whose squads are deep enough to rotate through a Champions League campaign without weakening, the shortest average recovery time belonged to Palace, Newcastle, Forest, Villa, Liverpool and Chelsea. Only Villa improved their league position. The four clubs who covered the most miles getting to matches, whether measured in total or per game, all finished lower than the previous season.
Rotation, and the long view
Squad churn tells the same story. Clubs in Europe made an average of 93.7 changes to their starting XI across the season, or 2.5 per matchday. Clubs without European football averaged 70.9, or 1.9. That is a different job for a coaching staff: more opponents, more playing styles, less time to prepare for any of them.
History offers plenty of precedent. Chelsea won the title in 2016-17 with a clear midweek diary. Liverpool secured only their second top-four finish in eight years that same season. Arsenal produced their unexpected second-place finish in 2022-23 during a stretch outside the Champions League. Newcastle have finished fourth and fifth in the two of their last four seasons without Europe, and seventh and 12th in the two with it. Tottenham’s best return in four years, fifth in 2023-24, came in their only European-free campaign.
None of which stops Chelsea, Spurs and Newcastle chasing a return. The money and the pull on players are what build squads capable of handling both calendars at once, and that is the only version of this problem any club actually wants to have.
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