Two seasons. Twenty-one knockout ties. Twenty-one victories. At this point, asking whether Premier League clubs are flat-track bullies in Europe feels like asking whether water is wet — except water doesn’t have a £100 million wage bill and doesn’t celebrate its inevitability on Instagram.
Let’s be honest about what we’re watching. The Europa League and Conference League have become the Premier League’s training ground, a place where English clubs go to practice finishing moves on opponents who arrived by budget airline and whose entire squad cost less than Manchester United’s left-back. It’s not sport anymore. It’s financial performance art.
The numbers are so absurd they’ve stopped feeling real. When a club from a league with the highest average spending power faces a club from a league where the third-best team’s budget is half of that, we’re not really asking who will win. We’re asking by how many. We’re asking whether the victory will be humiliating enough to make headlines or just another Tuesday where a team from a smaller league gets dismantled and goes home to contemplate why they bothered.
This isn’t even subtle anymore. Chelsea, Tottenham, West Ham, Manchester United — they’ve turned these competitions into a carousel of inevitability. They lose in the Premier League on Saturday, and by Wednesday they’re dispatching a perfectly respectable European team with the kind of casual brutality usually reserved for preseason friendlies. The gap isn’t just financial; it’s psychological. These teams know they’re supposed to win. Their opponents know it too. The match is almost secondary to the certainty.
The real scandal is that we’ve stopped finding it scandalous. We’ve normalized the idea that money doesn’t just win — it wins so thoroughly that it erases genuine competition from entire tournaments. The Conference League used to mean something. Now it’s a holding pattern for English clubs waiting for their inevitable advancement, a place where Fiorentina or Roma or some Turkish side gets to experience what it’s like to be outspent by a team that spent more on their training facility renovation than the entire opposing squad is worth.
And here’s where it gets genuinely funny: the Premier League acts shocked by its own dominance. Pundits debate it as if it’s some mystery, as if we haven’t all watched the same transfer market where English clubs spend like they’re buying groceries and everyone else is rationing flour. The answer to “Why do Premier League clubs win so much in Europe?” is the same answer to “Why do billionaires tend to be richer than everyone else?” It’s not a sports question. It’s a math question.
The Conference League, especially, has become a punchline. It was supposed to be the competition that gave smaller clubs their moment. Instead, it’s become the place where mid-table English sides go to pad their CVs against opponents whose biggest advantage is that they’re not completely demoralized before kickoff. West Ham’s recent run wasn’t a Cinderella story. It was a club with a £150 million squad playing against clubs with a tenth of that budget and acting surprised when the scoreline looked like a training exercise.
There’s no fixing this, by the way. UEFA could reshuffle the format, introduce salary caps, or pray for divine intervention, and it wouldn’t matter. The Premier League has money. Other leagues don’t. That gap compounds every season. The best players want to play in the Premier League because the money is ridiculous. The money is ridiculous because the best players want to play there. It’s a perfect cycle of financial dominance that makes competition feel quaint.
What’s genuinely interesting isn’t whether Premier League clubs will keep winning these tournaments — they will, with the kind of certainty you can take to the bank, which is where they’re taking their television money. What’s interesting is whether anyone will stop pretending this is sport and just admit it’s a transfer market exhibition where the entrance fee is a knockout tie against a team that had no business being there in the first place.
The 21 consecutive knockout victories aren’t a testament to English football’s tactical brilliance or depth of talent. They’re a receipt. They’re proof of purchase. They’re what happens when you let one league spend like it’s fighting a financial war and expect everyone else to show up with slingshots.
So yes, flat-track bullying is exactly what this is. The Premier League has turned the second and third-tier European competitions into its own personal playground, and the only thing more absurd than the dominance is how casual everyone has become about it. Next question?