Michael Laudrup vs. Kevin De Bruyne

KDB is not playing in the EPL in 1990s or 2000s, nor was the EPL as strong back then as it is now, so talking about Ballon D’or voting for the EPL in those years is entirely irrelevant. And the claim that De Bruyne “is the first PL player to have a ballon D’or podium since the 2000s” is incorrect. There’s been 1 or 2 EPL players on the podium for each iteration of the award since 2019 (during which time KDB has been the EPL’s best performing player).

Also, the idea that the difference between an average player in a top 5 league and a Ballon D’or shortlisted player who doesn’t get lots of votes “is probably 0 or nothing” is just plainly silly. As an example, in 2021, the lowest-voted person who was nominated was Luka Modric. In 2019, Karim Benzema got 1 vote and therefore finished 26th in voting. I could go on. You have to be a fantastic player to get nominated. The idea that only the top 3 players in Ballon D’or voting are relevant is crazy, and pretty clearly just intended by you to narrow things down to a point where the current EPL doesn’t look as great (and that’d basically just be almost entirely due to Messi and Ronaldo dominating the podium in the 2010s). Of course, even that fails as it relates to KDB being the best in the EPL in recent years, since the EPL has 4 of the 9 Ballon D’or podium appearances since 2019 (for reference: La Liga only had 3 podium appearances in Laudrup’s 7-year time there).

Or let’s instead take something between the number of podiums and number of nominated players: number of top 10 Ballon D’or finishes. The EPL has had 14 of the 30 top 10 Ballon D’or spots since 2019. For reference, La Liga only had 10 out of the 70 top 10 Ballon D’or spots during Laudrup’s entire time there (i.e. 1990-1996). And by the way, from 1974-1989, La Liga only had 17 Ballon D’or top 10 finishes. That’s an entire 16-year time period, where La Liga players barely had as many top 10 Ballon D’or finishes as the EPL has had since 2019. And in that entire 1974-1999 time period, La Liga had 36 top 10 Ballon D’or finishes. The EPL has had 22 top 10 finishes just in the 6 Ballon D’or votes taken since KDB first full year in the EPL in 2016. That’s 1.38 top 10 finishes per year for the 1974-1999 La Liga vs. 3.67 top 10 finishes per year for KDB’s 2016-present EPL.

There’s really just no way to slice this where the current EPL isn’t substantially stronger than the time period of La Liga we are talking about. You should move onto a different argument.

 

Yeah, as the overall talent level in a league gets higher, it should be harder for top players to get as high of average ratings (since their opponents are better). And that does not mean that the top players were better when the league had lower talent level and therefore top players could get higher average ratings. This is pretty obvious if we think about an extreme hypothetical. Let’s take a league of extremely low quality—a league made up of middle-aged, out-of-shape players who have barely played the sport before in their lives. Now let’s plop a second-tier-league professional player into that league. Their average rating will likely be 10.0 because they will easily dominate the extremely low quality opponents. Carlito’s logic would tell us that that player is better than current EPL players, because that player’s average rating is higher than any current EPL player. But of course we know that player is not better than EPL players. While that’s obviously an extreme example, I think it illustrates why top players occasionally having high average ratings in previous eras’ objectively less talent-filled EPL doesn’t mean those top players were better than today’s EPL’s top players who might have lower average ratings.

 

I used 2019-2022 there because that’s the timeframe in which KDB won EPL player of the season awards (he won EPL player of the season in the 2019-2020 and 2021-2022 seasons, and he won the EPL players’ player of the season in the 2020-2021 season). But you can really use any timeframe KDB has been in the EPL, and it simply won’t result in a conclusion that the 1970s-1990s La Liga was superior to KDB’s EPL.

Judging the quality of a league based on your subjective view of the quality of one match between teams from that league is self-evidently silly. And it’s even more silly when the context is that that match is the Champions League finals. The idea that the Champions League finals being between two EPL teams somehow leads to a conclusion that the EPL is weak is just outlandish.

You’re cherry picking one particular player who had a high rating on one particular rating website, trying to find the least impressive player that got a high rating.

I can’t say I’m particularly familiar with Pereira’s 2019-2020 season performances, and I’m sure he played well. But it’s worth noting that his WhoScored player rating is obviously a bit of an anomaly, since he only rated 37th in the league that year in SofaScore’s average ratings. Usually, the two ratings for a player are pretty similar (after all, I believe they use similar or identical underlying data), so all you’ve done is just cherry pick a bit of an anomaly where a player was rated quite highly by one website and not nearly as highly by another. That hardly is somehow evidence of the EPL being weak.

It is partly true that the EPL has gone up in esteem as a result of a decline in Real Madrid and Barcelona. Real Madrid lost Cristiano Ronaldo, while Barcelona’s board/finances was an utter disaster and they ultimately lost Messi. Those teams stopped being the clear two biggest teams in the world as a result of that.

That’s all true, but I don’t really see how that helps your point. Real Madrid and Barcelona not being the clear two biggest teams in the world anymore naturally leads to them no longer really being the consensus top-choice destination for the world’s most talented players. In turn, that results in even more top talent going to (or staying in) the EPL. Thus, this naturally makes the EPL stronger. Basically, it’s just naturally true that a decline in the fortunes of top clubs in other countries strengthens the EPL. And, as you note, that has definitely happened recently, increasing the strength of the league Kevin De Bruyne is playing in.

I don’t really understand what point you’re making here. You mention goals and assists for Laudrup in comparison to KDB’s 2018-2019 EPL season, but KDB was injured and only played a grand total of 973 minutes in the 2018-2019 EPL season, so that point is obviously meaningless.

You seem to mostly be suggesting that Man City scored a bunch in 2018-2019 even though KDB didn’t play much. But I know you know that that sort of analysis is just silly, because there’s so many other variables involved (other players coming and going, other players being injured one year or the other, form of the players on the team, differing tactics used by the manager, etc.), such that you really can’t use that to come to any conclusion about a particular player’s performance. And that’s particularly true at a club like Man City that has enough great players that KDB wasn’t at all being replaced by a scrub.

Just to illustrate that this sort of data is just all over the place and not very meaningful, let’s look at similar types of things for Laudrup. In 1988-1989 (the year before Laudrup came to Barcelona), they scored 80 league goals. In Laudrup’s first season, that only went up to 83—a smaller difference than the difference between 2017-2018 Man City and 2018-2019 Man City. And, in Laudrup’s last season at Juventus, the team scored fewer league goals than they did the year after he left (51 goals his last year vs. 56 goals the next year). Real Madrid also scored more league goals the year after he left than they did his last year (75 goals Laudrup’s last year and 85 goals the next year). But then again, Barcelona scored a lot more in Laudrup’s last year than they did in the first year without him, and Real Madrid scored more his first year there than they had the previous year. So these data points are all over the place for Laudrup. Like with Laudrup, you can come up with data points all over the place for KDB. You gave one data point already. A couple others: Man City scored fewer league goals in KDB’s first season than they had the season before (83 goals vs. 71 goals), but Wolfsburg scored way more goals KDB’s last season there than the season after he left (72 goals his last season vs. 47 goals the next season). The upshot is that this sort of analysis basically is meaningless because there’s so many other variables at play.

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Anyways, honestly, nothing you posted there is persuasive at all. The current EPL just is stronger and more talented than La Liga was in the 1974-1999 time period. It’s not even really a debatable issue, to be honest.

This is obvious from the simple historical fact that there’s been a massive consolidation of talent in the top leagues now—with the EPL actually being at the absolute forefront, with the most money and the most big clubs. Given this, we just logically know that a higher percent of top talent is in the EPL right now than was in La Liga in 1974-1999. It is also obvious from the fact that EPL players make up a massively higher percent of Ballon D’or vote recipients in recent years than La Liga players did in that era.

And present-day EPL being stronger is also obvious from the results that EPL teams have had, compared to what La Liga teams had in that era. The best way to measure this is by looking at Club Elo ratings—which measures how strong teams/leagues are compared to other teams/leagues, based on results of all the teams’ matches.

Right now, the average elo rating of EPL teams is 1786. That is by far the highest of any league, and is actually the 2nd highest of any end-of-year average elo rating of any league ever (barely behind La Liga’s end of year average elo rating of 1787 in 2007). The Bundesliga is 2nd at 1717, followed by La Liga at 1691, Serie A at 1647, and Ligue 1 at 1620. Here’s the year-end average elo rating of the EPL in each year KDB was there, with the ranking amongst all European leagues in parentheses:

EPL Average End-of-Calendar-Year Club Elo Rating

2022: 1786 (1st)
2021: 1772 (1st)
2020: 1754 (1st)
2019: 1757 (1st)
2018: 1714 (2nd)
2017: 1724 (2nd)
2016: 1706 (3rd)
2015: 1695 (2nd)

And, by the way, KDB was Player of the Season in the Bundesliga in the 2014-2015 season, and the Bundesliga had a 1714 average elo rating at end-of-calendar year 2014 (which was 2nd amongst all leagues).

By contrast, here’s the average club elo rating for La Liga from 1974-1999, with the ranking amongst all European leagues in parentheses (note: it genuinely may have also been lower than some non-European leagues in this time period too, and also European leagues outside the top-5 leagues were much closer in average elo rating back then than they are now, since they retained more talent). I’ve also bolded the years Laudrup was actually in La Liga.

La Liga Average End-of-Calendar-Year Club Elo Rating

1999: 1758 (2nd)
1998: 1720 (2nd)
1997: 1669 (4th)
1996: 1676 (4th)
1995: 1650 (3rd)
1994: 1615 (5th)
1993: 1620 (5th)
1992: 1616 (4th)
1991: 1628 (4th)
1990: 1615 (4th)
1989: 1631 (4th)
1988: 1653 (4th)
1987: 1662 (3rd)
1986: 1659 (4th)
1985: 1635 (4th)
1984: 1591 (4th)
1983: 1621 (3rd)
1982: 1661 (2nd)
1981: 1639 (3rd)
1980: 1628 (3rd)
1979: 1643 (3rd)
1978: 1633 (3rd)
1977: 1641 (3rd)
1976: 1634 (3rd)
1975: 1586 (5th)
1974: 1587 (5th)

In other words, KDB plays in arguably the strongest league in history, while Laudrup played in a league that generally was only the 4th or 5th best league in Europe at a time when there was much less consolidation of talent in the top leagues. The talent in their respective leagues really isn’t close.

 

I think there’s some validity to this point, though a team can be really good without having very very top players that might get Ballon D’or voting. That said, if you look at my above post, you’ll see me pointing out that club elo ratings are massively higher for today’s EPL than for that era’s La Liga. So this is an instance where one league is dominant in terms of team results and individual player award voting.

 

The fact that you’re trying to suggest that Miroslav Dukic is better than Salah is just a joke. And by the way, Dukic didn’t even start in one of those CL finals. You are obviously trolling, so please stop with this.

 

In essence, comparing the average Elo ratings of different leagues basically tell us how teams in those leagues have done in continental competition over the last several years (because that’s basically how elo rating gets taken from one league and transferred to the other, resulting in differences in the leagues’ average elo ratings). In the four years prior to 2007, La Liga teams had won 1 CL and 3 UEFA Cups, and had had multiple teams make recent deep runs in continental competition. In recent years, Barcelona had won the CL, Villarreal had made the CL semifinals, Deportivo had made the CL semifinals, Valencia had made the CL quarterfinals. Real Madrid was relatively underperforming in the CL but still was always making the KO stages (not to mention winning La Liga against teams like a CL-winning Barcelona). Sevilla had just won the UEFA Cup twice in a row. Espanyol had just made the UEFA Cup finals, Osasuna had just made the UEFA Cup semifinals (and only lost to another La Liga team). Betis and Celta Vigo had made the UEFA Cup round of 16. Meanwhile, in 2007, those teams that had had recent success in Europe weren’t even really the strongest teams in the league, with Real Madrid winning the league, and a bunch of teams finishing ahead of some of the above-mentioned teams (despite those above-mentioned teams getting good results in Europe—for instance, 11th place Espanyol destroyed a Werder Bremen team that was close to winning the Bundesliga title). That’s how La Liga had a high average elo rating that year—they had a lot of very strong teams that had been doing well in European competition.

But we aren’t talking about La Liga in 2007. We are talking about the present-day EPL and La Liga in the 1974-1999 time period (with a particular emphasis on the early-mid 1990s). Present day EPL is just substantially better and has substantially more talent than that era’s La Liga. It’s not debatable. You can certainly argue that Laudrup is superior to KDB, but this just is not a valid argument to that effect.

 

As an initial note on this, I’d say that the results of English teams against Spanish teams is obviously something that goes into club elo ratings, so it is already one part of a picture that has the current EPL as an extremely strong league. Club elo ratings also take into account results against other leagues’ teams, which is of course also relevant in measuring how good teams are. So club elo provides a fuller picture than this, and that fuller picture indicates the EPL is the world’s strongest league.

Addressing the point you made though, I don’t really think we should consider historical results against Messi’s Barcelona or Ronaldo’s Real Madrid in thinking about how strong the EPL is right now. For one thing, I think both of those teams are not as good as they were back then. Both had golden eras that are squarely in the argument for best club team ever, but they’re not as good as they were back then. Barcelona is quite a bit less good, while Real Madrid is still very good but not the best-team-ever contender they were with Ronaldo. Meanwhile, I think the EPL has gotten stronger than it was even just several years ago (which is reflected with everything from club elo scores to number of Ballon D’or vote recipients to champions league winner betting odds, etc.).

Of course, if we instead consider only the last few years (i.e. post-Messi/CR7), then the top Spanish teams have still done fairly well against EPL teams, but I don’t really see that it’s particularly meaningful. Basically, Real Madrid beat multiple EPL teams in the most recent Champions League campaign, but they also got knocked out of the Champions League by EPL teams the prior two years. Atletico Madrid very impressively beat Liverpool in the 2019-2020 Champions League, but they also got knocked out by Chelsea in 2020-2021 and by Manchester City in 2021-2022. Overall, in knockout tournament play, the top three Spanish teams have gone 6-4 against EPL teams in the last 3 seasons (and one of those wins was against a Manchester United team that finished 6th in the EPL that year). That’s solid for the La Liga teams, but considering that tournament play is pretty random, I don’t think that those fairly mixed results tell us much of anything, beyond perhaps that Real Madrid and Atletico Madrid (not mentioning Barcelona since they didn’t face EPL teams in this timeframe) probably aren’t MUCH better or MUCH worse than the top EPL teams.

My inclination is to think that Real Madrid in recent years is probably at the level of the very top EPL teams in a given year (i.e. the types of teams that would finish 1st or 2nd in the EPL), and that Atletico Madrid and Barcelona are currently probably equivalent to the tier of top EPL teams just below that (i.e. the type of teams that would finish 3rd or 4th in the EPL). And, honestly, that may be being generous to Barcelona. Ultimately, this doesn’t really lead to a conclusion that La Liga is as good of a league or as talented as the EPL, particularly when we realize there’s only three big clubs in Spain and there are more than three big clubs in the EPL. More big clubs means more teams filled with top-class players, which naturally means it is harder to be the standout player in the league (which is what this conversation relates to—the impressiveness of KDB being the EPL’s standout player).

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I also note here that I certainly have no particular bias or agenda as it relates to a discussion of the strength of different leagues. In past years, I’ve argued pretty strongly that La Liga was stronger than the EPL. And I do believe La Liga was the strongest league for virtually all of the 2010s. I just think that the EPL is now pretty clearly the strongest league. These things ebb and flow.

 

Ultimately, all of these results you mention have gone into the club elo ratings—which mechanically account for all results of European club teams. And those ratings have the EPL being the strongest league the last several years.

In any event, even if it were the case that the EPL “is probably the 2nd best over this time frame” that still makes it better than Laudrup’s La Liga—which was the 4th or 5th best league in the world (as evidenced by club elo ratings), in an era where there was less consolidation of talent in the top 5 leagues. It was very obviously less talented than today’s EPL.

I don’t think the EPL was as good a decade ago as it is now. A decade ago (and extending a decent bit more recently than that too), Barcelona and Real Madrid (and honestly, probably Atletico Madrid) were definitely at a different level from EPL teams—which caused very top players to definitely want to be on those teams above EPL teams. And in that era, in contrast to the last several years, club elo ratings bore out that La Liga was the strongest league, with the EPL not even necessarily being 2nd. But KDB wasn’t in the EPL getting EPL player of the season awards a decade ago. He’s done that more recently—when the EPL has, by all measures, been stronger.

You mention what the two best teams in the EPL do, but I do think it’s worth noting that out of the 6 CL finalists that the EPL has had in the past 5 years, two of those teams have finished just 4th in the EPL and been nowhere near the top of the table. Granted, tournament play has quite a lot of randomness to it, but it seems like it has some meaning that the EPL is strong enough for there to be multiple recent instances of major CL success by teams that really aren’t even in the conversation for being the league’s best team.

As for the strength of a NT, I agree that a country’s league is stronger when their country has a golden generation—since a country’s league typically retains a disproportionate number of those golden-generation players. It’s definitely not as important as it was in the past, though, since there’s no limits on foreign players, so a league like the EPL can very easily become really strong as a result of foreign players. In any event, I also think it’s a bit unfair to suggest England isn’t a strong NT at the moment. They made the SFs of the 2018 World Cup, made the finals of Euro 2020, and then went out to France in the QFs of the 2022 World Cup despite actually outplaying France IMO. They’re certainly not Spain 2008-2012, but they’re one of the top few NTs in the world, one of the best generations England has had, and are not really behind the NTs of any of the other top 5 league’s countries at the moment except France (who don’t really get their important players besides Mbappe from Ligue 1 anyways, so the strength of this generation of French players hasn’t really helped Ligue 1). And I’ll also note that Welsh players largely play in the EPL, and while it isn’t a powerhouse by any means, Wales has had its best ever generation recently, so that has helped the EPL a bit.

 

I guess I’m a little bit confused by this, and it seems to me like you’re largely just basing this off of Real Madrid beating those two teams last year—which, considering the randomness of tournament play, isn’t exactly strong evidence of anything.

There’s been a few recent seasons where Man City and/or Liverpool have accumulated huge amounts of points (i.e. 90+ points). Specifically, the following seasons:

- Man City 2017-2018 (100 points)
- Man City 2018-2019 (98 points)
- Liverpool 2018-2019 (97 points)
- Liverpool 2019-2020 (99 points)
- Man City 2021-2022 (93 points)
- Liverpool 2021-2022 (92 points)

In 2017-2018, Man City lost in the Champions League to Liverpool. In 2018-2019, Man City lost in the Champions League to Tottenham. Given that those losses came against other EPL teams, that says very little one way or the other about the quality of the EPL. You cannot say that the EPL is weak because a team that was dominating in the EPL lost in the CL to another EPL team.

In 2018-2019, Liverpool won the Champions League, beating the La Liga champion along the way, so your argument obviously cannot apply there.

In 2019-2020, Liverpool lost to Atletico. And in 2021-2022, Man City and Liverpool lost to Real Madrid. So those appear to be the examples you’re thinking off. But two things:

- A small number of CL results don’t really say that much, since tournament play is very random. For instance, it would’ve been easy to construct a similar argument about La Liga at one point. Specifically, in the 2011-2012 season and 2012-2013 season respectively, Real Madrid and Barcelona each got a record 100 points in La Liga, while Barcelona also got 91 points in that 2011-2012 season. And yet, in 2011-2012, Real Madrid lost in the CL to a Bayern Munich team that did not win the Bundesliga, while Barcelona lost in the CL to a Chelsea team that finished 6th in the EPL. Meanwhile, in 2012-2013, Barcelona was dominated 7-0 in the CL by Bayern Munich (not to mention that a Real Madrid team that got 85 league points lost to a Dortmund team that was a very very distant second place in the Bundesliga). Did those CL results happen because actually those Real Madrid and Barcelona teams were not that good and only dominated the league because La Liga wasn’t very strong? Or did those results happen because, even though those Barcelona/Real Madrid teams were amazing, random results happen in the Champions League? I’d definitely say the latter, so I find it hard to conclude otherwise for Man City and Liverpool.

- The two non-EPL teams that beat Man City and Liverpool in the years they’ve gotten 90+ league points were 2019-2020 Atletico Madrid and 2021-2022 Real Madrid. But, after beating Liverpool in 2019-2020, Atletico proceeded to be knocked out by EPL teams the next two years, and Real Madrid was knocked out by EPL teams the two years prior to 2021-2022. So it all just demonstrates the randomness of this stuff. Atletico and Real Madrid both beat EPL teams that had dominant seasons, but both also were knocked out twice in a row by EPL teams that weren’t having dominant seasons. Tournament play is just random, and I don’t really think any major conclusions can be drawn from such a low sample size of CL losses.

 

This is getting pretty off topic but I don’t think that that’s really true about the 2010’s La Liga. After all, smaller La Liga teams did pretty consistently well in the Europa League, with La Liga teams actually even winning the Europa League most of the years in the decade (including Sevilla winning three straight titles).

In fact, from the 2013-2014 season through the 2017-2018 season, La Liga teams won all but one European competition. The top 3 Spanish teams were really dominant against other leagues’ very top teams, but the results also suggested that the next tier of teams in La Liga compared favorably with the next tier of teams in other leagues.

Of course, an argument can be made that there were differences in effort put into the Europa League, but ultimately the fact that La Liga was dominating the competition that’s for second-tier teams makes it difficult to claim it was weak outside the top three teams.