Top 10 listed
Wolfsburg 2nd, Chelsea 6th – Ranking the worst-performing clubs in Europe this season
©IMAGO
The league table is often the perfect way to figure out which clubs have performed worse than all others in any given top flight, but it doesn’t provide the necessary context. A team may be bottom of the table because, frankly, they had the weakest squad in the division, while the club a few spots above them could be the laughing stock of the nation due to their unceremonious fall from grace. One is expected to be at the bottom of the table; the other simply is not. Fortunately, there is a handy way of deciphering which clubs have underperformed in any given league when we consider the market value of their squads.
When we consider the difference between a club’s ranking in a league based on their market value and their real-life position in the same table, we get a negative score and that numerical value helps us rank each club to definitively decide which clubs have under-performed all others this season. And, when we do that for every club in Europe’s top five leagues, we get an interesting table of some of the biggest names in European football, who are currently having league campaigns to forget.
The worst-performing clubs in Europe this season
As we can see in the table above, no club has fallen from grace quite as dramatically as Tottenham Hotspur this season. Due to the North London club ranking fifth in the English top-flight in terms of most valuable squads and 17th in the real table, they have a score of -12. The only other clubs that can come close to Spurs in terms of terrible returns for the talent in their squads are Wolfsburg and Nottingham Forest, who both sit on scores of -8. The Bundesliga side will finish in the bottom three of the German top-flight after a horrendous season, while Forest sit just five points above Tottenham.
Elsewhere, fellow out-of-form Premier League sides Chelsea (-6) and Newcastle (-6) stand out due to their embarrassment of riches in terms of squad market values, despite both clubs languishing in mid-table. Similarly, Girona (-8) and Nice (-7) can lay claim to some of the most valuable squads in Spain and France, respectively, but currently occupy spots in the bottom three of their league tables. Fiorentina, who only confirmed that they won’t be relegated very recently, also slumped to a -6 score due to their poor form in Serie A this season.
Homepage
Report
error
