The Champions League returns this week with English Premier League winners Manchester City the strong favourites to win the 2018/19 competition.
The regard for how well Pep Guardiola has assembled his mega-money squad has swept far and wide, and the football they produce regularly on a weekly basis indicates the expectancy for them to go far and likely lift Ol’ Big Ears at the Wanda Metropolitano on 1st June 2019.
The favourites following City (9/2) in descending order are Barcelona (6/1), Juventus (13/2), and Paris Saint-Germain (15/2) - all clubs which won their respective titles last season, are expected by the bookies to do so again, and represent four of the five highest ranked leagues by UEFA.
The last country- Germany- is represented by Bundesliga champions Bayern Munich (10/1), who are placed sixth just behind holders Real Madrid (8/1).
City are the most selected team in the competition by punters with 19.53% of bets being placed on the Cityzens, chosen slightly more than those favouring the Cristiano Ronaldo led Juventus.
But is this a sensible choice?
Not only are the 2017/18 Premier League record-breakers favourites to win the competition, but they remain odds-on to win back-to-back domestic titles, at 8/11, ahead of a resurgent Liverpool.
Recent history however indicates that this general consensus for Guardiola’s side to win their first Champions League title in their history may not be the wisest choice to part hard-earned cash on.
The Sportsman has examined every single one of the 26 winners since the Champions League changed it’s status from the European Cup ahead of the 1992-93 season, as well as their respective performances in both their league in the same year of achievement, and also the previous season which granted them entry into the tournament.
Read Madrid’s unprecedented success over the last three seasons in the competition has gone someway to sway the trends to predict who the winners of the most prestigious tournament in club football will be. Within the analysis, we’re also including inaugural winners Olympique de Marseille, despite their Ligue 1 title being removed due to a match-tampering scandal.
Just over half of this history of the competition has a team managed to win the Champions League simultaneously with their domestic league, definitively asserting the individual side as the best in Europe; the same number (14, 54% of winners) accounts for the sides that won their league the year before .
On ten occasions (38%) has the winner come from a team that didn’t ultimately finish immediate runners-up in their league, and just three times outside of a top four position, most recently in 2012 with Chelsea.
If one wanted to go further and immediately discount a whole host of contenders, the Champions League has only been won in four seasons over the 26 years (15% of the time) by a team that didn’t finish immediate runners-up in the previous season in their domestic league.
This would of course not only discard teams such as Tottenham Hotspur, 2010 winners Internazionale, Hoffenheim and Borussia Dortmund (who finished third and fourth in the 2017/18 Bundesliga, respectively), Olympique Lyonnais, but of course the holders of the trophy for the past three years, the Ronaldo-less Real Madrid who finished third in manager Zinedine Zidane’s final La Liga season with Los Blancos.
2018 finalists Liverpool would also be removed with this line of thought, going against the fact that they are the third most heavily backed team to win the competition with 16.87% of total bets going on the five-time European champions.
In the last decade, the tournament has only been won by a league champion in the same year on three occasions - mostly due to Real Madrid’s rampage in the Champions League but their relative lack of La Liga success and the dominance of Barcelona. This means that six of these seasons have been won by a team that just finished in second-place in their league to qualify for the Champions League. It is Barcelona who provide an additional exception; preceding their historic treble win in 2008-09 they had finished third.
This leads to perhaps the most interesting aspect registered by studying this time period; in the 2017/18 Premier League season, City’s perennial rivals Manchester United of course finished in the clear runner-up position. Jose Mourinho’s side may be a shrewd bet - currently at around 25/1 - for those who belief in an adherence to recent history.
Most discouragingly for City fans with astronomic expectations for the forthcoming season; throughout the entirely of the competition, there have only been nine champions (35% of the history of the competition) who have won the Champions League, and finished the previous season and the same season as League champions. With the wide expectancy to see City rampage through the Premier League once again, history dictates that this may very well hinder their chances of Champions League success in 2019.
This statistic not only slightly dents the hopes of those who heavily expect City to do the same, but ultimately gives hope to both their Premier League challengers currently chasing Blue shadows and those wanting to take over Real Madrid’s crown as champions of Europe.
