Champions League Kicks Off with the Premier League Ruling the Transfer Market, but No Titles in Four Years

The Champions League kicks off this week carrying a heavy statistic: it has been four seasons since an English club lifted the trophy. The Premier League is once again sending five teams into the 36-club league phase, and it's doing so after another runaway transfer window, in a European soccer landscape where fewer and fewer clubs can keep pace with England financially.

One number sums up the gap in scale: nine of the ten most expensive transfers of the summer were paid by English clubs. The lone outsider to crack that list was Real Madrid, which shelled out 125 million euros (roughly $145 million) for 19-year-old Ivorian winger Yan Diomande, signed from Leipzig.

Manchester City raises the curtain on Tuesday in Porto with a midfield rebuilt through sheer spending power: Enzo Fernandez, Elliot Anderson and teenager Ayyoub Bouaddi, a trio that cost the club roughly $440 million combined. Liverpool, meanwhile, hosts Atletico Madrid on Wednesday with Bradley Barcola freshly arrived from PSG for 125 million euros, and can field an attack featuring Alexander Isak and Florian Wirtz, three names who rank among the 13 most expensive transfers in soccer history.

And yet, neither Manchester City nor anyone else from England has won as much this decade as Paris Saint-Germain or Real Madrid itself, each of which has claimed two titles since 2020, more than the entire Premier League combined.

Mourinho's Madrid and a Historic Three-peat Bid for PSG

If Real Madrid wins this edition under Jose Mourinho, UEFA's prize money (drawn from a total pot of 2.5 billion euros, about $2.9 billion) would barely cover the cost of signing Diomande plus the Portuguese coach's salary. It all begins Tuesday at the Santiago Bernabeu against Inter Milan, the very same stage where Mourinho won his second Champions League in 2010 just before leaving the Inter bench for Madrid. Now he returns 16 years later, those two Champions League trophies still on his resume, and once again crosses paths with Inter, now managed by Cristian Chivu, one of his players on that 2010 title-winning side.

PSG arrives as back-to-back champion chasing something only Zinedine Zidane's Real Madrid achieved between 2016 and 2018: winning three straight titles in the competition's modern era. It won't be easy, not even for Paris, which hasn't won any of its first four Ligue 1 matches this season. Luis Enrique's side adds Ferran Torres, a World Cup winner with Spain, though its priciest addition on paper, Maghnes Akliouche at 50 million euros, doesn't even crack the 30 most expensive transfers on the planet this summer. On Wednesday PSG hosts Slovan Bratislava, who arrive with Yaya Toure on the bench: the former Barcelona and Manchester City player, a Champions League winner in 2009, became the first African coach to guide a team into the league phase after eliminating the champions of Georgia, Sweden and Slovenia.

Among the newcomers, Azerbaijan's Sabah stands out, visiting Old Trafford on Thursday, a club founded in 2017 when Mourinho happened to be managing Manchester United. And Norway is enjoying a curious moment: after 18 years without a representative, it now has two teams, Viking and Bodo/Glimt, who make their debuts this week against Stuttgart and Bayern Munich respectively.