European Fatigue

The Champions League and Europa League start this week and along with the razzmatazz, they also bring a ready made excuse for managers. How many times have we heard a poor weekend performance blamed on mid-week exertions?

The reasons sound plausible. Playing football twice a week can be tiring, mentally as much as physically, especially when coupled with trips to far-flung corners of Europe. Then there is the time lost to prepare tactically for domestic fixtures at the weekend.

From a betting perspective, I wanted to see if there was any merit in opposing teams immediately after a European set of fixtures. I looked at the last three years and compared results immediately after an European encounter, with 5 days rest or less, to those when they hadn’t played mid-week in Europe.

*Note: I removed Birmingham City from the analysis as relegation to the Championship could have skewed the results for reasons other than fixture congestion. E.g. loss of key personnel. 

As you can see from the results Europe had no effect on a team’s results in the league. On average teams involved in European competition earned 1.76 points per game immediately after a mid-week encounter, compared to 1.78 when they had a clear schedule, a variation of just 1%.

Splitting the teams by European competition seemed to have no effect either.

Teams involved in the Europa League actually performed slightly better than those in Champions League, but the difference is so small it isn’t significant.

Granted this is only based on three years worth of data, but you shouldn’t be put off backing a team returning from European encounters.