20 years of the EPL. Was it good or bad for English football? « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News, supporting the club, the players and the manager

By Walter Broeckx

There was a question Anne asked in the comment section of one of her great articles about the way the PGMOL is acting in the media. “Would the EPL really be such a loss?”  I understood this as : Would losing the EPL really be such a loss.  If I misunderstood you Anne, I’m sorry but never mind as my interpretation got me thinking.

And so I went on to search to see if the EPL has brought back only good things to English football in general. Of course we know that it brought an enormous amount of money to the clubs. And an enormous amount of money to well the people behind the scenes. But has football in England benefited from the EPL?

Because the EPL is being branded as the best league in the world by the people who sell it. And to some degree that might be close to the truth. Most of the time the people who sell the EPL are the media. And we know that the media likes to harp around about winning being the only real important thing in football. I just have to point to the ever returning mantra to express the ultimate failure sentence: it has been X years since they won….

So winning is everything. And as the EPL is branded the strongest, the best, the hardest, the ultimate league it surely must mean they are winning things compared to the rest.

Therefore I compared a few things. I compared the possible influence of the EPL on winning things in other competitions. I compared how many trophies the English clubs have won in Europe before the start of the EPL era and after. I even went on to search for the possible benefit for the national team.

If it comes to the national team I can be very short. England only won one trophy. I don’t think anyone in England will not know the year 1966 when England won the world cup at Wembley. I don’t want to rub it in too much for English people but since then you won nothing. And since the installation of the EPL well…. Despite a big hype surrounding some players England never got even close to a final. Apart from 1996 when they reached the Euro semi final when it was played in England. So the English national football team has had no benefit from the EPL.

So I went on to see how English teams have been doing in the different European competitions. And again I compared this with the cups won before 1992 and the ones after.

I point out the fact that as a result of the Heysel disaster English clubs were banned for 5 seasons from participating in European competitions. So I took those 5 years away from the totals.

If I can start with the former Europacup II: the cup winners cup. And again a problem is that this competition is stopped and has been brought together with the former Uefa Cup (now Europa League). So to work on this I took the Uefa cup and Europa League to make up for the missing years. After all, in those years the FA cup winner played in those competitions so could have won it.

So in the last 20 years we have had 3 English winners in these competitions. That is a winning chance of 15%. But in the years before the EPL started the English teams won 6 cups in 26 years. That is a winning chance of 23%. So the chance of winning has gone down for English clubs since the start of the EPL.

I move on to the Uefa Cup and put this together with their follow-up competitions. Since 1992 we had one English team winning the Uefa Cup-League. That is a winning chance of 5%. Before the EPL started English teams won 3 times in 14 years. A winning chance of 21%. Again the start of the EPL did not bring many trophies to English clubs.

And finally I took the numbers from the Champions League and compared it with the Europacup I. And by coincidence (money I think) the CL is also 20 years old. And in the last 20 years the CL has been won 3 times by English clubs. Meaning that English clubs have a winning chance of 15%. But in the 31 years before the EPL and the CL started English clubs have won it 8 times. And that was a winning percentage of 25%. Even if Chelsea win it this year it still will be a lower percentage than before.

I have made a summary of this and  put this in a table that you can see below.

	PRE 92	YEARS	Winning %	AFTER 92	YEARS	Winning %
CL	8	31	25,81%	3	20	15,00%
UEFA CUP	3	14	21,43%	1	20	5,00%
CUP WINNERS	6	23	26,09%	3	20	15,00%
Average % succes		24,44%			11,67%

And so you can see that before the EPL started the English clubs had a chance of winning any European cup of almost 25%. And that has gone down to 12%.

So how should we answer the initial question? Would it be a disaster if the EPL would be brought back to what it was before? Yeah the enormous amounts of money going to the clubs in the top league would go away for a bit – certainly because it would be shared out more and perhaps because TV would not want to show the extra games between the smaller clubs. But would that be a bad thing? The more money there is the more the money launderers and others hang around.  So we could get rid of those shady people, maybe.

And when it comes to the most important thing according to the media: winning. It sure does look that starting the EPL was very bad for the chances of an English team to win any European cup.

So would it really be a disaster if we would get rid of the EPL formula?

——————–

Footnote: In this calculations I left out the Inter Cities Fairs cup. In this competition English clubs had a winning chance of almost 31%. It would make the EPL era look even more bad. It would raise the general pre EPL winning % to almost 28% compared to the current 12% winning chance.