Premier League 3-0 La Liga: Is this the new normal for Champions League competition?

Is it far too early to be making sweeping statements about the state of European football when the first matchday of the Champions League hasn’t even finished? Yes.

Is that going to stop us in any way? No.

Because this first set of games always looked like one that might give us another big steer about just how much the Premier League’s strength in depth is starting to influence European competition.

We obviously saw this last year with Chelsea yawning their way through to winning the Conference while barely even trying, holding off a series of third-tier sides from across the continent in the manner of Nelson Muntz dealing with Springfield Elementary second-graders.

Funnier still, of course, was the Europa League where Spurs and Manchester United forgot all their domestic troubles all the way to the final, where Spurs managed to be a tiny fraction less dreadful than United for just long enough to win.

Even in the Champions League, where English teams didn’t quite nail it, they still only really came up short against the absolute elite the continent could throw at them. Man City were honking pretty much throughout the competition, but it still took Real Madrid to eliminate them.

And England’s other three representatives were all narrowly beaten across three straight rounds by a wonderful PSG side that promptly put the struggles of those knockout rounds in perspective by thoroughly toying with Inter in the final.

The point is that while other leagues have one or two teams who can still trouble the Premier League’s best, none now come close to the depth of the Premier League. There is a very real possibility – probability, even – that one quarter of the 24 teams who make it to the Champions League knockout stages this season will come from the Premier League.

Four of England’s six representatives were paired with Spanish opposition in the opening round of matches, which was always going to give a decent early steer on how the balance of power currently lies across the two countries that have been the continent’s strongest for some time now.

While Barcelona may yet land a blow for La Liga at Newcastle, the teams who finished third, fourth and fifth in last season’s Spanish league have now all come away empty-handed from encounters with English teams who weren’t even anywhere near their best.

Arsenal were uncharacteristically disjointed and clunky before leaning on their bench strength to see off an Athletic Club side who for most of last season looked the likeliest winners of the Europa League, sauntering through the group stage and knockout rounds en route to a home final until they got marmalised by a historically bad Manchester United side in the semi-finals.

A Tottenham team featuring six players and a manager making their Champions League debuts could barely string two passes together against Villarreal, yet the team that scored more goals in Spain last season than anyone bar the Big Two couldn’t even muster a meaningful shot on Guglielmo Vicario’s goal after their own goalkeeper contrived to chuck an early Lucas Bergvall cross into his own net.

Then came the visit of Champions League stalwarts Atletico Madrid to a champion but new-look Liverpool side yet to fire on all cylinders. Within six minutes, they were 2-0 down. And sure, Liverpool needed an injury-time winner to prevail in the end, but that’s just what Liverpool apparently do now.

So easy has football become for Arne Slot’s side that they are cheerfully taking and then p*ssing away 2-0 leads just to feel alive, before securing victory with a flamboyantly late finish.

It’s already the third time Liverpool have pulled off that particular party piece this season in a campaign that is only five games long but has also additionally featured an absurd 83rd-minute winner and 95th-minute heartbreaker.

They are already quite clearly the team to watch this season, but the fact they’re dealing with Atleti the same way they deal with Bournemouth does feel like something’s out of kilter in the world of elite European football.

None of those three teams produced anything like their best football, yet all have recorded wins in what were, on paper, among their toughest assignments of this stretched-out group phase.

Until the latter stages, the Champions League really is no longer that distinguishable from Premier League action for these clubs. Sure, there’s a handful of similarly equipped clubs who can do you a mischief, as Chelsea discovered against a Harry Kane-inspired Bayern Munich and Newcastle may well discover tonight.

But for the most part, Champions League opposition even from the upper reaches of La Liga is now not meaningfully, conspicuously tougher than routine Premier League combat. Bournemouth gave Liverpool as much trouble as Atletico Madrid, and Tottenham far more trouble than Villarreal.

We’re not having a go at Bournemouth, but it shouldn’t be this way, should it?

The financial chasm that now exists between good Premier League teams and every continental team outside the truly gilded elite handful is just so vast now that it’s hard to see how this phenomenon is reversed.

Things may get more interesting next week when the Europa League kicks in. We could be wrong, but it seems unlikely at this point that Aston Villa and Nottingham Forest in their current guise will ease through that competition the way Spurs and United did. But are they also actually really any worse than those two idiots? And Crystal Palace should be ideally placed to make the best of the rough hand they’ve been dealt by London Bussing their way to a second major trophy in the Conference.

English teams in European competition last season either won silverware, or were eliminated by another English team, or came unstuck against the Champions League’s best ever team, or actual champions PSG.

And the early evidence of this season suggests that will become more trend than outlier, where even the Premier League’s daftest big clubs only truly come unstuck against each other or the tiny handful of continental giants who can still just about compete.