Everyone mocked him at the time, but Arsene Wenger had a point.

In 2012, after Arsenal lost to Sunderland in the FA Cup and while they were down 4-0 against AC Milan before the second leg of their round of 16 tie in the Champions League, Wenger solidified the focus for the rest of his team’s season. He said: “The first trophy is to finish in the top four.”

While this lack of ambition seemed to some like it was a cause of Arsenal’s then-seven-year trophy drought, that wasn’t quite true. The construction costs of Arsenal’s new stadium had hamstrung their ability to spend as much as Manchester United, Manchester City and Chelsea — Wenger was merely citing the economic reality in which he was living.

To have a shot at competing with those teams in the future, the Gunners needed to secure the extra millions of dollars in revenue generated from qualifying for the UEFA Champions League by finishing in the top four of the Premier League.

While you don’t get any silverware for finishing in the top four, finishing there was much more likely to lead to a Premier League or a Champions League title than winning the FA Cup or the League Cup. And if a top-four finish is more important than two of the competitions they hand out trophies for, well it kind of is its own trophy.

It’s not like we don’t treat it as such, either — the top-four race is one of the three ways we give texture to each season along with the title race and the relegation battle. (I don’t think it was done on purpose, but I applaud our collective hive mind for not settling on “race” to describe a competition between teams that are trying to avoid, rather than achieve, something.)

Even with the added guarantee of a fifth Champions League spot for the Premier League, this season hasn’t been any different. From here on, Manchester United, Aston Villa, Liverpool and Chelsea will mainly be judged by whether or not they secure one of the five spots. As Liverpool manager Arne Slot put it back in February: “If we don’t have Champions League football, it’s definitely not been an acceptable season. … That does have an enormous impact on the way this club is run.”

The impact on revenue is massive, but in the world of fixture bloat and player burnout, might there be a hidden benefit to missing out on the world’s most prestigious competition for a season? After all, Man United and Aston Villa, two of the teams in the current top four, aren’t playing in the Champions League this year.

Maybe missing out on the Champions League isn’t such a terrible thing for Premier League teams after all?

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The economic impact of missing out on the Champions League

Let’s take Liverpool as an example.

After nearly winning the quadruple in the 2021-22 season, everything fell apart the following year. Jurgen Klopp’s team finished fifth — the first, and only time, in his eight full seasons at the club when they didn’t qualify for the Champions League.

The impact here is pretty straightforward. Per data from Kieron O’Connor’s excellent Swiss Ramble, here’s the club’s broadcast revenue from European competition in all of Klopp’s full seasons at the club:

• 2016-17: none
• 2017-18: €81 million
• 2018-19: €111 million
• 2019-20: €80 million
• 2020-21: €88 million
• 2021-22: €120 million
• 2022-23: €84 million
• 2023-24: €27 million

In 2016-17, Liverpool weren’t in Europe competition at all, and in 2023-24, they were in the Europa League. As Slot said in February: “When I arrived here and only signed Federico Chiesa, it was after a Europa League season.”

This is true, and less revenue means less money to spend on improving the team. But what’s interesting is that Slot is suggesting that the financial impact from missing out on the Champions League actually comes a year later. The transfer spending at the club suggests as much, too.

The €12 million deal for Chiesa was Liverpool’s only permanent move in the summer of 2024. But after the disappointing 2022-23 campaign, Liverpool spent €172 million combined (per Transfermarkt) on the acquisitions of Dominik Szoboszlai, Alexis Mac Allister, Ryan Gravenberch and Wataru Endo ahead of a season without Champions League matches.

Don’t forget: They also agreed to a nine-figure, Premier League-record deal with Brighton for Moisés Caicedo, who instead decided to join Chelsea — another club that failed to qualify for the Champions League after four consecutive top-four finishes.

Now, I’m not totally convinced that Liverpool only cut their spending in 2024 because of the lack of Champions League revenue from the preceding season. They also signed current backup goalkeeper Giorgi Mamardashvili from Valencia to a deal to be made permanent the following season. They had agreed to sign Martín Zubimendi from Real Sociedad too, only for him to make a last-second U-turn and stay in Spain for another season before joining Arsenal this past summer. Plus, they also had to sort out the contract situations for their three best and most expensive players: Mohamed Salah, Virgil van Dijk and Trent Alexander-Arnold.

Unlike in 2012, when clubs such as Arsenal were competing financially with the top four teams in all of Europe’s other major leagues and added European revenue might mean you would sign someone who otherwise would’ve went to AC Milan, the biggest Premier League clubs are now only really competing with Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, Barcelona and Paris Saint-Germain for talent. The rest of the Premier League is competing with the top-four teams in all of Europe’s major leagues now.

The combined commercial and broadcasting revenues generated by the topflight in England means that losing out on Champions League revenue, on average, isn’t as painful as it used to be. In 2022-23, Liverpool and Chelsea ranked seventh and ninth, respectively, in global revenue among all clubs. In 2023-24, with neither club in the Champions League, they ranked eighth and 10th.

The potential benefit of not being able to win the Champions League

In 2016-17, with Liverpool rebounding into the top four after an eighth-place finish and Chelsea winning the Premier League title after a 10th-place finish the previous season, a new theory seemed to emerge: Not having to play in the Champions League was actually beneficial for your Premier League performance.

To test this, a trained astrophysicist and Harvard professor wrote a blog post where he looked at the relationship between the season-to-season change in European matches played by a given team and the season-to-season change in Premier League points won.

“[For] each extra game a team plays in Europe, they can expect to lose half a point relative to the previous season,” he wrote. “So, if a team plays 12 more games, it will be 6 points worse off [on average] than the previous season.”

The author, funnily enough, was Laurie Shaw, who now holds the title of “chief scientist” at Liverpool. At the time Shaw wrote the piece, a number of other analyses had determined that there was no “hangover effect” for teams playing in Europe. In other words, teams that had just played a match in Europe didn’t perform worse than expected in their following Premier League match. Shaw’s work suggested that there’s a kind of cumulative effect from extra devoting resources — energy, strategy, travel, etc. — to European matches.

Last month, the blogger Markstats looked at the past three seasons and found there still to be no clear hangover effect in the Premier League. Since we can’t ask Shaw to just rerun his analysis for every season since 2016-17, I decided to do it — but only with Champions League matches.

This is how it looks when you plot all of the pairs of seasons when a team competed in the Champions League in at least one of them:

While it’s not a strong relationship, it’s close to the same relationship that Shaw observed in 2016. You can see it in the downward slope of the trendline.

Based on this data: For every extra Champions League game a team plays, they lose a little more than a third of a point on average. So, every three extra games in the Champions League are worth about one point in the Premier League table. And if we remove last season, when the total number of Champions League games increased for everyone, then the numbers match Shaw’s — a point lost for every two extra Champions League games played.

Now, there are lots of confounding factors here. When some teams miss the Champions League, they’ve usually been unlucky to an unsustainable degree. The same goes in the other direction: Sometimes teams qualify for the Champions League because of unsustainable hot streaks. How much of this is inevitable regression to the mean? And how much of this is a genuine decline in performance related to the extra intense games on your schedule?

But at the very least, there’s something here. It seems reasonable to expect the best teams to actually play more games in the Champions League, so the fact that on average teams perform better in the Premier League while playing fewer Champions League games suggests to me that there is a real negative effect of the added toll of extra high-level matches.

I also looked at the total number of games played from season to season across all competitions, and there’s basically no relationship to changes in points, so that suggests there’s something about the Champions League in particular that affects domestic performance.

Of course, it would be absurd to say that it’s better not to be in the Champions League. We don’t watch or care about sports because of the financial results they produce — the finances help produce the results and get produced by the results. The point of all of this is to try to win things like the Champions League and the Premier League. The way you do that is by, you know, actually participating in the Champions League.

But I do think we’ve potentially entered a stage of the Premier League’s growth where the teams are so rich, and the competition is so grueling, that there’s potential for a one-year exponential boost for a club that drops out of the competition. You’ll still have lots of money to spend on your roster because of the European revenue from the previous season, you’re probably going to have some better luck going forward, and you’ll get a full season without the potentially deleterious effects of all those midweek Champions League matches.

Whoever misses out on the top five this season would seem like a logical pick to bounce back into the Champions League places next year. So, Liverpool or Chelsea fans: There’s something that might be able to help you sleep at night.

Amateur golfer Kai Trump was on hand for one of the sport’s premier events this week. The granddaughter of President Donald Trump traveled to historic Augusta National Golf Club, where she had the opportunity to get an up-close look at some of the world’s top golfers competing for the coveted Masters green jacket.

But Trump traveled to Georgia knowing five-time Masters champion Tiger Woods would be absent. Woods was arrested after a rollover crash in Florida late last month. 

He later announced he would not compete at this year’s Masters. A Florida judge allowed the golfer to travel outside the U.S. to enter a “comprehensive inpatient treatment facility,” court records showed.

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Trump’s mother, Vanessa, has been publicly linked to Woods and showed support after his DUI arrest, writing “Love you” in an Instagram Stories post featuring the pair.

The 18-year-old Trump shared highlights from her visit to Augusta National in a post on Instagram Thursday, including a photo with LIV Golf’s Bryson DeChambeau and his caddie, Greg Bodine.

Kai Trump poses for a photo with Bryson DeChambeau during the 2026 Masters at Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta, Georgia on April 9, 2026. (Instagram/@KAITRUMPGOLFER)

“What a special place,” Kai, who is set to take the next step in her golf career at Miami, captioned an Instagram post with a heart emoji.

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The Martin County Sheriff’s Office in Florida said Woods was traveling at “a high rate of speed” when his vehicle collided with another car, causing it to roll over onto the driver’s side.

Authorities said Woods “exemplified signs of impairment.” He blew “triple-zeroes” for alcohol but refused a urine test.

“DUI investigators came to the scene here, and Mr. Woods did exemplify signs of impairment. They did several tests on him. Of course, he did explain the injuries and the surgeries that he had. We did take that into account, but they did do some in-depth roadside tests,” a sheriff’s department spokesperson said.

Tiger Woods of Jupiter Links Golf Club after a match against the Los Angeles Golf Club at SoFi Center March 24, 2026, in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. (Adam Glanzman/TGL/TGL Golf via Getty Images)

Woods entered a not guilty plea in response to the DUI charges. Before his arrest, he indicated that playing the season’s first major was a possibility.

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In the 14 majors since he won the green jacket in 2019, Woods has failed to muster a top 20 finish. It’s his longest such streak since failing to finish in the top 20 in the first six majors of his career in 1995 and 1996. In his last 26 majors, he has only four top 20 finishes.

Since finishing tied for ninth at the 2020 Farmers Insurance Open, his best finish in his 18 official events since then has been a tie for 37th at the 2020 PGA Championship.

Woods has not competed in a professional golf tournament since 2024, when he competed in just five events — the Genesis Invitational and the four majors. He withdrew from the Genesis, finished dead last in the Masters and missed the cut in the other majors.

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The New Hampshire Fisher Cats, the Toronto Blue Jays’ Double-A affiliate, achieved a rare feat not seen in the post-expansion era. 

Portland’s pitchers — New Hampshire’s opponent for a six-game series — combined for walks, wild pitches and hit batters, paving the way for the Fisher Cats to pull off the feat.

The Fisher Cats fell behind 2-0 early in Tuesday’s game against the Sea Dogs, the Eastern League affiliate of the Boston Red Sox.

But New Hampshire scored its first eight runs in the second inning without recording a single base hit.

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The Fisher Cats exploded for 10 runs in the inning — nine with two outs — on just one hit and no errors, the final box score in New Hampshire’s 12-7 win showed. The feat was fueled by Portland pitchers issuing eight walks and hitting two batters. Sea Dogs pitchers also uncorked four wild pitches and allowed a sacrifice fly and the inning’s lone hit.

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Sea Dogs president Geoff Iacuessa couldn’t believe what unfolded.

“I don’t ever remember seeing that here or any other game I’ve ever seen,” Iacuessa told Portland’s WGME Channel 13. “It was crazy. I thought maybe something was going on with the scoreboard, and then I checked the GameChanger, and it was correct.”

The rare moment happened amid frigid conditions that prompted the stadium’s ground crew to clear the playing grass and infield after heavy snow fell earlier in the day. Temperatures were just a few degrees above freezing at first pitch.

The inning unraveled quickly after a quiet start, when Portland starter Hayden Mullins issued two walks and uncorked a wild pitch despite striking out the side in the first. New Hampshire then broke through with a sacrifice fly.

Hayden Mullins pitches for the Portland Sea Dogs during a game against the Harrisburg Senators at FNB Field in Harrisburg, Pa., Aug. 5, 2025. (Kyle Mace/Minor League Baseball)

Mullins eventually managed to record two outs, but then lost control, walking three straight to tie the game. Jorge Juan came on in relief but hit the first batter he faced with the bases loaded.

A wild pitch made it a 4-2 score, and a walk loaded the bases again for the Fisher Cats. Juan then hit a batter, making it 5-2, before firing another wild pitch to push the Sea Dogs deficit to four runs. Juan walked two more to push it to 7-2 before leaving the mound with a runner at each base again.

Cade Feeney took the hill next and finally stopped the leaking, but not before a wild pitch made it 8-2 and New Hampshire outfielder Ismael Munguia’s two-run single pushed the lead to 10-2.

Ismael Munguia of the New Hampshire Fisher Cats poses for a photo during the team’s photo day at Delta Dental Stadium in Manchester, N.H., March 30, 2026. (Michael Owens/MLB Photos)

Munguia represented his native Nicaragua in last month’s World Baseball Classic, appearing in four games.

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Not even a team at the major league level has scored more than four runs in an inning without recording its first hit, according to the Elias Sports Bureau. 

MLB.com reports it has happened just 16 times in American League and National League history that a pitcher allowed five runs without surrendering a hit in 1⅔ innings or fewer.

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