Make up a football formula

The Game Room
1

In Europe, the top football club competition is the Champions League.
It’s very popular, both in countries entering and spectators watching.

36 clubs from 17 countries qualified for the initial group stage, as shown here.

Table & standings | UEFA Champions League 2025/26 | UEFA.com

Now here’s my request.
Commentators often say “this league is the strongest in Europe.”
Well I’d like Dopers to come up with a formula to rank all the countries based purely on the table and finishing positions.

So a simple example would be:

Country rank is higher as per the higher number of clubs that qualified for the table.

But hopefully you lot could come up with better (perhaps using table positions as well?)

To help, here is the table listed by country, number of clubs + club position:

England (six) 1,3,4,6,8,12
Spain (four) 5,9,14,29
Germany (four) 2,16,17,33
Italy (four) 10,13,15,35
France (three) 11,21,25
Portugal (two) 7,24
Belgium (two) 19,27
Netherlands (two) 28,32
Greece (one) 18
Turkey (one) 20
Azerbaijan (one) 22
Norway (one) 23
Cyprus (one) 26
Denmark (one) 31
Czech (one) 34
Kazakstan (one) 36

2

Hmm, lots of ways to do it, I’d think

Assuming you want to use both of these factors: number of teams and finishing position of each team.

Likely you want to multiply the two somehow. Unclear to me if you think it should be linear (i.e. finishing 1st is just a bit better than finishing 3rd, the difference between 4th and 5th is the same as the difference between 33rd and 34th) or exponential (1st is quite a bit better than 3rd, with the gaps “flattening out” the further down you go).

If you go with something linear, I’d just average the finishing positions, subtract that from 36, and multiply by the number of teams.

So England would get: (36-[(1+3+4+6+8+12)/6]) * 6 = 182 points.
Kazakhstan would get: 0 points.

The total “country table” would be:

Country Points
England (six) 1,3,4,6,8,12 182
Spain (four) 5,9,14,29 87
Germany (four) 2,16,17,33 76
Italy (four) 10,13,15,35 71
France (three) 11,21,25 51
Portugal (two) 7,24 41
Belgium (two) 19,27 26
Greece (one) 18 18
Turkey (one) 20 16
Azerbaijan (one) 22 14
Norway (one) 23 13
Netherlands (two) 28,32 12
Cyprus (one) 26 10
Denmark (one) 31 5
Czech (one) 34 2
Kazakhstan (one) 36 0

That doesn’t feel too bad to me, but maybe some tweaking is in order?

ETA: An easier way to explain this formula is you are just giving points for each spot earned - from 35 points for first down to 0 for last. Then just add up all the points.

3

There are three very different groups of clubs in that score, and that should be taken into account, even if it is not apparent at first sight.
First group: teams placed 1 to 8, qualify directly to the knock-out round of the last 16.
Second group: teams placed 9 to 24, play the play-offs in pairs against each other. They are paired by draw, probably with some tweaking as usual in UEFA and FIFA drawings. Consequently only half of them will qualify for the round of last 16. And they will have to play two more high stakes games than the first 8, with the corresponding risk of injury, losing form, over scheduling etc. They should get fewer points, around half I suggest.
Third group: 25 to 36. Those clubs no longer play in the Champions League this season. They are eliminated. No points deserved.

So the points I would award are:
1st to 8th place: 100, 98, 96, 94, 92, 90, 88, 86 points.
9th to 24th: 50, 49, 48, 47… 39, 38, 37, 36 points.
25th to 36th: no points.

England wins by a country mile, but the first four nations in the precedent post do not change. Whether France and Portugal switch places I am too lazy to calculate, as it does not matter.

4

So, I think there are a couple big issues with trying to do this.

  1. Strength of a league isn’t well defined. Is a top heavy league where the #1 team is ~the best in the world but the bottom of the table is terrible better than a league where everyone is pretty good, but unlikely to win the UCL?
  2. Measuring a league based only on some subset of the teams assumes some sort of merit in making the UCL.

Probably more issues too.

If you’re only going on table + position, ignoring points, GD, strength of schedule, etc I think you just give points in proportion to how far up the table you are perhaps with some lower weight for number of teams. That is having more teams is better, but the 4th team is worth less than the 3rd team from the same country.

That said @Jas09 's ranking comports with popular understanding for at least the top 6 slots, which seems like a good endorsement.

5

ISTR reading recently that a pretty good gauge was wage bill. Sure, every now and then a team with a smaller payroll will make it big, but over a longer haul, those highly paid players tend to push their respective teams to the top. And it’s a much easier metric than many other formulae.

6

So the obvious way would be to build a league of leagues based on the results between teams from different countries. It would need be averaged unlike a normal league as there would be different numbers of results between different leagues (far more England-Spain results than Cyprus-Czechia)

The problem with that method is it doesn’t take into account how many teams from the league are actually competitive in Europe. Many leagues have one or two teams that dominate and are completive in Europe but all the other teams are far weaker and do much worse in European competitions. IMO those leagues are weaker than leagues like the premiership where at least half a dozen teams are competitive in Europe. So you’d need some way of weighting the European results with recent domestic results. So leagues where teams that did badly domestically did well in Europe are weighted higher. No idea how that would work exactly, I’m not a stato :wink:

7

Just read that, my technique doesn’t work then…

based on the results between teams from different countries

I don’t think it’s possible, just based on the champions league table and nothing else.

8

Thanks for the replies!

I think that remarks like “this League is stronger than that League” are almost always not backed up with any evidence.
Although the Champions League is only one piece, it’s still better evidence than nothing.

I agree that the wage bill is also a reasonable indicator.

And of course - what is the definition of a ‘string League’?
Personally I reckon it’s having both successful teams at the top with decent competition almost all the way down.
There are some European Leagues where the same two or three clubs win every year - so no strength in depth.

9

UEFA already do something called the country co-effiecient to decide how man teams from each country qualify and at what stage. It is based on performances in all European competitions (there is the UEFA league for teams just below CL qualification and UEFA conferance for teams below that) over the last 5 years. It isn’t perfect as the majority of teams in the top tier of their national league do nt qualify for Europe so it does not differentiate between those league where the teams that don’t qualify are almost as good as those that do and those leagues where half the teams are much weak than the rest.