Low Liga: Spain’s Champions League decline signals a shift in power

The 2019/20 UEFA Champions League marked the first time since the 2006/07 season that La Liga was without a representative in the semifinals. Since 2005/06, La Liga teams have claimed 10 of the 30 available spots in the final, with the league lacking a finalist on just seven occasions.

Over the past 15 seasons, Real Madrid and Barcelona have each claimed four Champions League titles giving each two more than their nearest competitor, Bayern Munich.

But after the first leg in the 2020/21 Champions League Round of 16, Real Madrid was the only one of the four La Liga teams to claim a victory, beating Atalanta 1-0 despite playing a man up for the majority of the game. Barcelona was humiliated by PSG, Atlético Madrid was very timid in their 1-0 loss to Chelsea and Sevilla was beaten 3-2 at home by an energetic Borussia Dortmund team.

La Liga fans have seen the transitions in personnel amongst their top teams. Those moving pieces, as well as recent Champions League results beg the question, is La Liga in decline?

It’s a complex question, but one well address in this data analysis. You may recall a Total Football Analysis article called The Art of Overachieving where I looked at the salaries and transfer money spent on players, as well as looking at the data of players in and out. Ill leave it to you to go back and read that article for the evidence that La Liga has not lacked investment over the past few years. Instead, this data analysis will look at La Liga teams from a tactical standpoint, examining whether the turn to more direct and transitional football has jeopardized their contention for the Champions League title.

Attacking efficiency

The first area we’ll look at is attacking efficiency and the vertical aspect of the game. With the game moving towards possessions with fewer passes and less time of control on goal-scoring moves, we want to see if La Ligas top teams are behind the curve in these aspects of the game.

In each of the visualizations in this article, Ive used a colour-coded system to label La Liga sides in orange and each other country in blue. Youll also notice half of the teams have a star while the other half are represented with a filled circle. The shapes represent the first leg result in the Round of 16. If a team’s point is represented with a star, note that they won the first leg, whereas a circle indicates the losing team. There were no draws, so the two shapes are enough to represent all 16 teams.

Turning to our first graph on attacking efficiency, were looking at the percentage of counterattacks and positional attacks that end with shots. Here we see that La Liga teams are actually doing quite well. In the current campaign, Barcelona leads the way in their percentage of positional attacks ending with the shots while finishing second to Bayern Munich in counter-attacking efficiency. Sevilla isnt far behind and Real Madrid is more or less at the median in each category. Meanwhile, Atlético Madrid rates 13th in counterattacking efficiency and hits the median in the percentage of positional attacks leading to shots.

There really arent any issues on that graph, except perhaps Atlético Madrids poor counterattacking efficiency, which is one of the big surprises.

Next up is progressive actions. On a per 90-minute basis, were looking at progressive runs and progressive passes. Wyscout’s website can provide the full definition for the statistics, but suffice it to say that progressive actions are any events that significantly progress the ball higher up the pitch. The closer to the opponents goal, the lower the distance required for progression.

In terms of progressive actions, Real Madrid is not only tactically balanced but highl