Does An Early European Campaign Help or Hinder Teams?

Much has been written over the past few years about how the Europa League has a damaging effect on the league form of Premier League clubs. This trend has also been evident when looking back at the likes of Spurs, Everton, Stoke and Hull. Much of this is down to playing twice a week on a Thursday and then Sunday, with a smaller squad than the Champions League teams.

However, my thoughts instead turn to the early Europa League qualification stages and its possible impact on clubs’ early-season form. My line of thinking is that by replacing pre-season friendlies with ‘competitive’ European qualifiers, a club can gain momentum and carry it into the early parts of the league season. What prompted this theory is recalling what West Ham experienced in the 1999-2000 season under Harry Redknapp. Having qualified for the Intertoto cup (the equivalent to today’s Europa League qualifiers), the Hammers went on to win the mini-competition (with four wins out of six games), qualify for the UEFA Cup proper and also hit the ground running in the league with wins in four of their first six league fixtures.

To investigate further, I took a look at the form both domestically and in Europe for Premier League clubs who took part in the Intertoto cup since 2000.*

Form of Intertoto Teams

I have also included Fulham of 2011, the only other Premier League team to have qualified for the Europa League via the Fair Play table. Fulham, like West Ham today, also found themselves in need of a new manager in the same summer.

Despite the Intertoto cup being, well, a cup competition, I have converted the results into points in order to give a comparison to Premier League results.

Looking at the above, there does seem to be some correlation between teams having a successful time in the European competition qualifiers and then going on to have a successful start to the Premier League season. The two outliers from this sample appear to be Bradford and Fulham. Bradford have the excuse of having an incredibly difficult set of opening Premier League fixtures. Fulham, however, had a much easier set of fixtures, so their sudden drop in form is more difficult to explain and goes against my theory.

Normal pre-season to regular season momentum is a notoriously difficult thing to predict. Many teams have a great set of pre-season results but then go on to have a bad start to the Premier League season and vice versa. With competitive European fixtures replacing the usual pre-season games, it does seem that perhaps winning these competitive fixtures genuinely helps a team’s confidence and momentum for the league. This is perhaps difficult to explain given that the quality of the opposition is still normally very low and I appreciate that the sample is still very small, so feel free to draw your own conclusions.

I often see people on these boards discount Europa League teams’ assets, but my point is that there could be a distinction between the Europa League proper and the Europa league qualifiers.  If West Ham have a successful Europa League qualification campaign in July, it may just be worth considering their assets for the early weeks of the Premier League season.

*I have chosen to look at those since 2000 as this seems to be when the competition was restructured to provide a possible six fixtures, instead of three.