Abstract
This research focuses on examining the development of various European nations through the performance of their clubs in continental competitions. To achieve this, a comprehensive analysis of the UEFA country coefficients over the past 15 years has been conducted, as these coefficients serve as a reliable measure of a national football association’s clubs success across all UEFA continental competitions. By doing so, we aim to identify nations that have experienced remarkable improvement as well as others whose decline is evident.
Introduction
The association coefficient is a system used by UEFA to rank the football associations in Europe and determine the number of teams that qualify from each association to its continental competitions every season, as well as the qualifying phase they enter. Game results of the past 5 years in the 3 competitions (Champions League, Europa League, Conference League) are taken into account, while bonus points can also be awarded for qualifying to a group or knock-out phase.
While individual clubs have achieved success over the years, these are often exceptional cases that deviate from the average performance of their country. Greece (which has been performing relatively poor in the recent years) was ranked 9th overall for the 2023-2024 season, primarily due to the performance of Conference League reigning champions Olympiacos Piraeus, the first Greek club to progress beyond the quarterfinals since 1996. In contrast, Ukraine, once a top-10 country on this list, is now ranked outside the top 20.
Data & Methodology
In this research we utilize historic data that is available online and refers to the year-to-year UEFA association coefficients from 2009 onwards. Using this data we will first examine the evolution of the top-5 nations according to the strength of their domestic leagues. Then we focus on a few other nations that establish interesting case studies.
In the final part of this research, we analyze the relationship between FIFA rankings and UEFA association rankings. Using a dataset covering 5 nations over 11 years, we first apply the Shapiro-Wilk test to assess if the data follows a normal distribution. We then conduct a correlation analysis to determine the nature and significance of this relationship.
Results
Top-5 Leagues
Our analysis begins with the top five European domestic leagues: the Premier League (England), La Liga (Spain), Serie A (Italy), Bundesliga (Germany), and Ligue 1 (France). Figure 1 illustrates how these nations have performed in UEFA association coefficients over the last 15 years based on the points their clubs have collected.
Spain and England have consistently dominated the top spot, with Spain leading for nearly a decade during its golden era (5 Champions League and 5 Europa League titles). However, in the past five years, England has surged ahead, increasing its coefficients by 31% since 2015-16, while Spain has experienced a notable decline of 3-4% annually.
German and Italian clubs have shown occasional international success but have not challenged Spain or England significantly. Their performances have fluctuated but have shown improvement since 2020. Meanwhile, France remains distant from the top four, occasionally ranking close to Portugal and Russia in certain seasons.

Rest of Nations
The situation amongst the rest of the nations had been relatively stable during this period, since most of them have not seen a dramatic upwards or downwards trend. There are a few exceptional cases worth mentioning though :
- Ukraine has dropped by more than 10 places in the ranking from 2010 till 2024. A nation that had never been ranked outside the top-10 till 2020, last year was ranked 18th and is expected to drop even further (currently ranked 23rd).
- A similar trend can be observed for Greece. From the 10th place back in 2012 in just 8 years it dropped to the 20th place. However, its performance over the last 2 seasons (especially the contribution of the latest Conference League winner, Olympiacos Piraeus), has brought it back to the 12th place.
- Norway has probably been the biggest climber over the last 15 years. An association that barely made the top-25 till the mid 2010’s, often ranked below others such as Belarus, Bulgaria or Cyprus, in a period of just 5 years (2019-2024) it moved up from the 23rd to the 14th place.
- After a long period of quite average performance, The Netherlands has been enjoying some success lately. During the 2021-22 season only England managed to collect more country coefficients, while also for 3 years in a row it surpassed France’s performance.
Relationship Between Association Coefficients and FIFA Nation Rankings
In the final part of this research, we examine the correlation between UEFA association coefficients and FIFA rankings, focusing on the performance of five nations over the period under review (Figures 2-6), while specifically using three of them as examples.
- Belgium, ranked in the top-5 of FIFA’s year-end rankings for nearly a decade, consistently struggled to break into the top-8 in UEFA association coefficients.
- Croatia, the World Cup runner-up in 2018 and ranked 4th in FIFA that year, achieved its highest-ever position in the UEFA association coefficients during this period. It has remained a fixture in the top-20 since 2014, a mark it first entered that year.
- Serbia, despite financial challenges and a heavy reliance on domestic players, managed to reach 11th place in UEFA association coefficients in both 2022 and 2023, demonstrating solid international performance.





The Shapiro-Wilk test p-value for both variables (FIFA ranking and UEFA association ranking) is less than 0.05 (0.0021 and 0.0002 respectively). This indicates that our data doesn’t follow a normal distribution and hence the Spearman’s correlation coefficient will hereby be used. This is also evident in the scatterplot of Figure 7, where the data points do not form a straight line.

The overall Spearman Correlation coefficient is 0.51, with Serbia having the greater value (0.87) and Belgium the lowest (0.02). So indeed there is a positive relationship between those variables, with Serbia being an exceptional case : the better its national team performs, the better the Serbian clubs also perform in international competitions. The p-value of the overall coefficient is 0.0001. Since it is <0.05, we can conclude that this correlation is statistically significant, even though this doesn’t apply to all nations separately.
Conclusion
In this research, we analyzed the UEFA association rankings of several European nations. England and Spain have dominated the top spots, while Germany and Italy have maintained stable performances without leading. Nations like Ukraine and Greece have declined, allowing others, such as Norway, to climb. Our findings indicate a correlation between success in club and national team competitions, though this varies significantly by country. Future studies could explore factors like economic strength, reliance on domestic players, or the number of clubs in continental tournaments.