Want to cook up a get-rich-quick scheme? Figure out who wins the UEFA Champions League. Although the tournament purports to crown the champions of Europe, the best team in Europe usually don't win it.
Let's start in 2010-11. OK, bad example. That's the 2010-11 Barcelona team that Sir Alex Ferguson called the best side he'd ever seen. The next year, though? Chelsea finished sixth in the Premier League -- and won the Champions League.
Bayern Munich were the best team in 2012-13 when they won it all, but the next season, Real Madrid finished third in LaLiga and lifted the cup. In 2014-15, it was the other potential best team of all time, the Lionel Messi-Luis Suarez-Neymar Barcelona.
Then, once again, it was Real Madrid, who, once again, didn't win their domestic league. In 2016-17, Real Madrid won it again and did win their domestic league this time. They dropped down to third the following season, but still won the Champions League again -- beating the fourth-place team in England in the final. That team, Liverpool, rose up to second the following season and won the Champions League. In 2020-21, Bayern eviscerated everyone; they were the best team in the world.
Last year, Chelsea beat Manchester City in the final. Chelsea also finished 19 points behind City in the Premier League.
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Put another way, just five of the previous 11 Champions League winners have won their domestic league. Since 2010, Real Madrid have won the Champions League twice as many times as they've won LaLiga. And yet, this is the defining competition in modern soccer, the tournament that drives everyone mad and, at least half of the time, leaves us with unlikely champions who we all scramble to explain after the fact.
The simple explanation for all this: Knockout soccer is random. Anything can happen across the seven matches it takes to go from the round of 16 to lifting the trophy, which is what makes this tournament so great.
Legacies are defined by a couple of coin flips among the greatest players and coaches in the world. We don't need rote dominance over a large-enough sample of matches to truly determine the best team -- we already have domestic soccer for that -- but that also doesn't mean the Champions League is totally random, either. Otherwise, I don't know, Ferencvaros or Krasnodar would've won this thing at some point in the past decade.
There are some patterns that have united all of the previous champions since the 2010-11 season, and we can apply those to all of the teams in this year's last 16. We'll run through a number of statistical categories and eliminate the teams that don't meet the threshold until there's a team or two still standing.
Is this the most scientific approach? No. Is it more fun this way? Absolutely. Let's get to it.
All stats are up to date through Feb. 11 and come courtesy of Stats Perform. Domestic play only.