If the European soccer season ended today, there would be only one repeat champion among Europe's top seven leagues. Liverpool lead annual Premier League champions Manchester City by a point -- conveniently, the two teams play this Sunday. Bayer Leverkusen, unbeaten in all competitions, lead 11-time defending Bundesliga champs Bayern Munich by a jarring 10 points with 10 matches to go.
After ceding LaLiga back to Barcelona last season, Real Madrid now lead the league by seven. After slipping to third while Napoli ran away with Serie A in 2022-23, Inter Milan are on pace for 100 points and lead Juventus by 15 points (and last season's champs, Napoli, by 29). In Portugal, Sporting CP have responded to a rare fourth-place finish by surging back to first, one point ahead of Benfica with a game in hand. And a year after losing to Feyenoord by seven points, PSV are unbeaten in league play and lead by 10. Only nearly-annual Ligue 1 champions Paris Saint-Germain are positioned to repeat.
Aside from Leverkusen, of course, none of these teams are exactly upstarts. Still, repeats are the name of the game in this sport -- Bayern have won 11 straight Bundesliga titles, Manchester City have won five of six Premier Leagues, Juventus recently won nine straight Scudettos, PSG have won nine of 11, et cetera -- and with the way things have taken shape heading into the season's stretch run, we could end up a bit short of them.
While it's obviously far too early for any sort of "Why did the incumbents fall apart?" retrospective -- after all, some of them haven't actually fallen apart yet -- we can at least take a moment to talk about how the new leaders (and PSG) have reached the top of the table at this point in the year.
What are the stats and trends behind the biggest leagues' leaders?