Six teams, zero wins: The Premier League’s Champions League problem goes deeper than one bad week
No Premier League side won their Champions League round of 16 first leg. Beyond the individual collapses, there’s a structural problem with England’s football calendar that’s been hurting English clubs in Europe for years.
Six Premier League clubs entered the Champions League round of 16 this week. None of them won their first leg. Real Madrid beat City 3-0 at the Bernabeu. PSG thrashed Chelsea 5-2 in Paris. Atletico put five past Tottenham. Galatasaray held Liverpool to a 1-0 win in Istanbul. Arsenal and Newcastle could only manage draws against Leverkusen and Barcelona respectively. You could explain one or two of those away. But six clubs, six ties, and the best result any of them could manage was a 1-1 away from home. In a way, the situation goes beyond just a bad week.
Looking at the individual results, City were always going to struggle against this Madrid side, with Valverde scoring a first-half hat-trick and the 15-time winners looking sharper and more dangerous than Guardiola's men at every turn.
As for Chelsea, their goalkeeping situation has been a problem all season, and Liam Rosenior made it worse by starting Filip Jorgensen ahead of Robert Sanchez in Paris, with Vitinha capitalising on a mistake from the Czech keeper to make it 3-2 before the floodgates opened. Tottenham's implosion in Madrid has been covered at length. Liverpool, despite 15 attempts at goal, couldn't convert in Istanbul after Mario Lemina headed home from a corner the visitors had no business conceding. Arsenal's 1-1 in Leverkusen, with Havertz's penalty rescuing a draw, is the most manageable of the lot, and Newcastle's 1-1 against Barcelona at St James' Park, with Yamal equalising from the spot late, is a result they can work with.
But the overall picture is damaging regardless.
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Now, too many people are reaching for tactical explanations when the structural one is staring everyone in the face.
Fixture congestion is killing English clubs in Europe, and it's been doing it for years. The Carabao Cup starts in August, before the Premier League is even three weeks old. Most top European leagues don't start their domestic cups until the new year. La Liga clubs enter the Copa del Rey in December. Bundesliga sides begin the DFB-Pokal in August but the format is single-legged throughout, so the amount of minutes accumulated is nothing close to what an English side takes on.
The Carabao Cup has two-legged semi-finals, which means a club can play four League Cup knockout games before January is out, on top of the Premier League, the FA Cup and, for the six involved this week, Champions League group and knockout games too.
Chelsea, for example, played 120 minutes against Wrexham in the FA Cup while PSG, their Champions League opponents, had their own weekend fixture postponed.
That's one side turning up to a knockout tie with 90 extra minutes in their legs that their opponents didn't have to run, and in a sport where physical freshness directly affects decision-making, reaction time and concentration, this matters.
The two-legged Carabao semi-finals are even harder to justify. The competition gets its profile from being a route to Wembley for clubs who can't compete for the top prizes, not from the prestige of a home-and-away semi-final format that only adds fixture pile-up.
Arsenal are actually the best example of how to manage all of this, and even they drew in Leverkusen. Arteta rotates more than almost any other manager in the league, uses his squad intelligently across competitions and has consistently argued for calendar reform at the highest level. And yet he still arrived at the round of 16 without Merino, and some players managing one injury or another.
The depth Arsenal have built is the reason they're seven points clear in the Premier League and still alive in Europe. But even the best-managed squad in England can only absorb so much.
The second legs are next week, and some of these ties are absolutely still alive. Arsenal at home with Leverkusen is genuinely open. Newcastle hosting Barcelona, with the first leg level, is a proper occasion.
Chelsea at home to PSG, three goals down, is a mountain but not a wall. Liverpool can still turn Galatasaray over at Anfield. City, three down against Real Madrid, is the longest shot of the lot. Spurs are all but done.
But win or lose next week, the conversation about how English clubs are being set up to fail in Europe by their own domestic calendar is the one worth having. The Premier League is the richest league in the world and it has six clubs in the Champions League last 16. It should be dominating this competition, not going winless across an entire round of first legs. Something structural is wrong, and Tuesday and Wednesday night made that impossible to ignore.
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