The world's best football clubs, on one scale

Why so many Premier League clubs?

9 of the top 20 clubs in this ranking, and 17 of the top 50, play in the Premier League. It is the first thing most people notice, so here is why we think it is right and how we tested it.

It comes from results, not reputation. The core of a club's score is two things added together: how strong its league is, and how well the club plays within that league. Points, squad strength, pedigree, form and schedule are blended in on top, but with smaller weights. League strength comes from the matches where leagues meet, mainly European competition. On that evidence, the model gives Premier League clubs a league boost worth about 0.6 goals per 90 minutes. That boost, not any judgement about famous names, is why mid-table English sides rate so highly.

Premier League clubs' European results match the boost. If the boost were too big, English clubs would keep falling short of their ratings when they play abroad. They do not. When we look back at matches between clubs from Europe's big five leagues, the league part of the rating explains the results almost one for one. It is not too big and it is not too small.

It predicts the next season better. The hardest test is a forecast. We froze the ratings at the end of a season and used them to predict the following season's Champions League, Europa League and Conference League matches: 883 matches in 2024-25 and 905 in 2025-26. Then we ran the same test with the Premier League boost cut in half, and again with it removed. Both cuts made the forecasts worse, in both seasons. With the full boost the ratings picked the winner of 69.4% and 70.8% of decisive games; with no boost, 68.7% and 69.8%.

Clubs' own European results now count too. Since this week's update, a club's results in continental competition count directly towards its own rating, not just towards its league's strength. That is one reason PSG are now 5th. If Premier League clubs were living off their league's name, this change would have exposed them. It did not: 7 of the top 15 are still English, and over two seasons of test matches the change made the forecasts slightly better in total, worse in the first test season and better in the second.

None of this means every English club is better than every club elsewhere. Bayern München, Barcelona, PSG and Real Madrid are all in the top six. It means that, on the evidence of the games where leagues meet, playing well in the Premier League is very hard, and the ratings reflect that.