United & Spurs: Bottom-Half and Beating Europe
What Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester United's European Run Proves For the Premier League
This might read like a rant (because it is), and depending on where your loyalties lie, it might even sting a little. But right now, we have the clearest evidence yet to shut down any debate about which league is truly the best in world football.
Tottenham are 16th. Manchester United are 15th. And both are one decent second leg away from meeting in the Europa League final. That’s not a punchline. It’s a proof point.
For all the snide tweets and punditry fluffing up the “fall” of these two clubs, the reality is this: they’re in the gutter domestically and still outclassing the Europa League’s best available opposition in 2025. That doesn’t mean United and Spurs are so much better on Thursday nights. It means the Premier League is something else entirely.
Let’s call it what it is. These aren’t two teams hovering outside the top six with eyes on Europe. These are clubs in crisis. United are 15th, having changed managers mid-season, fought through back-page headlines, and still can’t string two convincing league performances together. Spurs? Ravaged by injuries, struggling for rhythm, clinging to identity by a thread.
And yet, here they are. In control of their Europa League semi-final ties. With one foot in Bilbao.
They’re not peaking at the right time. They’re just playing teams from leagues that can’t match what they face week in, week out in England.
This is where the conversation shifts. Not to whether these clubs deserve praise, but to what it says about the ecosystem they come from.
You can be in complete disarray in the Premier League and still have enough quality, fitness, and tactical sharpness to walk through a European knockout stage. That’s not some reflection of individual brilliance. It’s what happens when your “broken” squad still contains a lot of internationals and your weekly competition doesn’t allow complacency.
It’s not a budget thing alone either. Sure, Premier League money is absurd compared to most of Europe. But it’s what that money’s built: clubs that can put out second-choice XIs better than many firsts across the continent.
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Let’s not confuse the issue. The Champions League still lives at the top of the food chain. La Liga, Bundesliga, Serie A, even Ligue 1, on any given year, can produce finalists, and in Spain’s case, often winners. That won’t change.
But some of the football world needs to stop mistaking having great teams for being a great league. 2 or 3 teams world-class teams do not make a league.
It’s not a revelation, but it’s worth saying again, because we’re watching the clearest evidence yet. Europe’s top leagues are top-heavy. Once you get past the top two or three, the drop is steep. In the Premier League, it’s steep the other way. The drop from 5th to 15th might be rough in terms of form, but the quality? The physicality? The pressure? It stays high.
That’s why these Europa League results don’t feel all that shocking.
This isn’t a brand-new take. But it’s never felt more vivid. The debate for “best league in the world” gets argued constantly online. But when the 15th and 16th best teams in England are dominating teams in the latter stages of a major European competition, that’s not delusion, it’s proof.
What’s wild is that neither club has played well across this season. They’ve stumbled, stalled, and looked psychologically drained more than once. But throw them into Europe, where the game slows down just enough, and the talent gap shows.
That doesn’t make the Europa League irrelevant. It just confirms the Premier League is the most unforgiving league in the world, and the most complete from top to bottom.
Spurs and United aren’t thriving, they’re surviving. But they’ve survived long enough to expose the gap. Not between themselves and their Europa opponents, but between the Premier League and the rest of Europe once you step outside the elite tier.
The intention here is not to dunk on the other leagues, I love watching football from the continent, it’s just to illustrate that even the messiest teams in the Premier League can go head-to-head with most in Europe sitting in the top halves of their tables, and that’s what makes it undeniably better quality overall.
That’s the conversation, comparing a league needs to be the full league vs league, not cherry picking a couple of teams, even if those teams are the best in the world at any given time.
Now, sure, you could argue this doesn’t happen every year, and that’s fair. But I’d bet good money that if you dropped the 15th and 16th-placed teams from any of Europe’s other leagues into this competition, you wouldn’t find them in the semi-finals, let alone both on track for the final after comfortable 1st legs. And that’s the point.
Thanks for reading, David Skilling.
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