The Champions League draw is set, with each side now knowing their path to the final in Munich.

The knockout rounds showcase the best of European football, but with Aston Villa, Liverpool and Arsenal drawn in the same half, their route could feel more domestic than continental.

While undoubtedly a tough draw, the three sides will be relieved at the reduced prospect of long journeys as they juggle their domestic ambitions. Liverpool and Arsenal are battling for the Premier League title, while Aston Villa need a top-four finish to guarantee re-entry into Europe’s top competition.

Domestically, each side has no more than seven away games left, keeping their Premier League travel fairly even. But in Europe, the further they progress. the more onerous the travel burden becomes.

On this front, Villa will be the most relieved — there’s a real chance their route to the final will involve just one trip outside England, a last-16 game at Brugge. Arsenal, meanwhile, probably face the most onerous schedule.

Among the known last-16 ties, the renewal of the fierce Madrid derby poses the fewest logistical concerns. Kylian Mbappe expressed his preference for this tie saying. “It would be much better if we don’t have to travel — we travel so much,” he said in his post-match interview after his hat trick against Manchester City.

New format, more travel

The changes made to the Champions League may partly explain Mbappe’s travel fatigue.

The revamped Swiss model-inspired league phase added more variety to the fixture list, with teams facing eight opponents instead of playing six matches home and away against just three teams. This has tripled the number of unique group-stage fixtures from 48 to 144, but the increased workload has raised concerns about fixture congestion and player welfare.

It’s not just the increased minutes that wear down these increasingly stretched squads, but also the additional air miles they accumulate travelling across Europe. The combined distance travelled in this season’s Champions League is already higher than the past two seasons, totalling more than 190,000 miles.

The distance covered is relatively low compared to American sports — most NBA teams, for example, travel more than 40,000 miles per season — but it still takes its toll.

Excluding the Conference League, The Athletic measured each team’s European air miles using straight-line distances between home and away stadiums.

Of the English clubs, Ruben Amorim’s Manchester United top the list, having travelled almost 9,500 miles during their Europa League campaign, including trips to Bucharest and Istanbul against FCSB and Fenerbahce.

Meanwhile, Villa’s first Champions League campaign has involved trips to Belgium, France, Germany, and Switzerland, totalling just over 100 miles more than their 4,180-mile trip to Trabzonspor in the 1994-95 UEFA Cup.

It’s little surprise that a Europa League side tops the list, given the broader geographical spread in that competition compared to the Champions League, which tends to be dominated by teams from western Europe.

Regardless of who racks up the most miles this season, they can expect little sympathy from Portuguese powerhouses Porto and Benfica. Aided by their immaculate record of qualifying for Europe in every season since 1992-93, the pair have accumulated nearly 700,000 miles in UEFA competitions (roughly three times the distance to the Moon).

Benfica also hold the record for the longest European away day, when they travelled more than 7,000 miles to face Kazakh side Astana during the 2015-16 Champions League — roughly equivalent to the distance between London and Hawaii.

Does travel impact performance?

Managers often wince at the prospect of long-haul European trips, fearing the disruption to their domestic form.

After Liverpool’s 2009-10 Champions League draw, then-manager Rafael Benitez welcomed the short trips, saying, “The important thing, as always, is that the travelling isn’t too bad, we don’t have too far to go for any of the games.”

Even domestic journeys have sparked complaints. After Manchester City’s 1-0 loss at Tottenham in February 2023, Pep Guardiola complained: “It’s so exhausting coming to London.”

Arsenal hold the modern record for the furthest distance travelled in European competition in a single season, clocking up more than 21,000 miles in their 2018-19 Europa League fixtures, when they finished runners-up to Chelsea. That included a 6,000-mile round trip for the final in Baku (albeit both teams were faced with that logistical challenge).

But is travel distance a legitimate concern, and does it actually impact performance?

“The findings of our research suggest that travel distance is the No 1 most impactful metric on performance,” says Stephen Smith CEO of Kitman Labs, a performance intelligence and technology company, specialising in injury welfare and performance analytics. “It’s not just about the distance itself but how it interacts with other factors like team cohesion, form, and recovery periods.”

Kitman Labs’ study, which used machine learning algorithms to analyse more than 61,000 fixtures from the top seven European leagues over the past two decades, found that travel distance had a greater impact on match performance than opponent quality or team form.

Smith explains that this is a consequence of the general upheaval caused by travel. Sleep patterns, dietary routines and circadian rhythms — the physical, mental, and behavioural changes a human being experiences over 24 hours — are all disrupted when playing away from home.

“You can’t replicate the mattress you sleep on, the temperature of the room you’re sleeping in — all of those things have a huge impact,” says Smith.

Top-tier sports science can only do so much to mitigate these effects.

However, Smith believes that clever squad management can help counteract them, and that data analytics can advise coaches on rotation strategies that maximise player rest without disrupting team cohesion.

The effects of a midweek European match

Villa, in particular, have struggled to perform after a midweek Champions League tie this season.

They have won just one of their eight Premier League games played directly after a European game (at home against Wolves in September, after their first Champions League game at Young Boys). In mitigation, two of the games played after European away matches were against Liverpool and Bournemouth, tough games regardless of when they fall. There is also the issue of this being the club’s first Champions League or European Cup campaign since 1982-83: this was a novel experience for many in the squad.

Overall, however, while long-distance travel impacts the outcome of European matches, it rarely affects the next Premier League fixture.

The graph below compares the average points per game (PPG) of Champions League teams after European matches with their PPG in all other league fixtures. Season-on-season differences are so minor they can largely be attributed to random variance. This effect holds when accounting for the distance travelled in Europe.

However, as Smith points out, the adverse effects of travel aren’t always immediate. Instead, they accumulate over a draining season.

Newcastle, for example, struggled to balance Champions League and domestic commitments last season, ending the campaign in seventh. Similarly, ninth-placed Villa have found it difficult to juggle both competitions.

To gauge this longer-term impact, The Athletic examined how changes in total miles travelled in Europe from one season to the next affected a team’s PPG.

Teams that travelled fewer miles in Europe tended to pick up more points in the Premier League. The effect is small but potentially decisive: on average, an extra 10,000 miles in European travel was associated with a roughly three-point drop over the season — fine margins that could be vital.

One striking example is Antonio Conte’s first season at Chelsea. The London club missed out on European qualification entirely in the previous campaign, finishing mid-table with just 50 points. Yet in 2016-17, free from midweek continental trips, Conte’s side stormed to the title with 93 points, spearheaded by a ruthless Diego Costa.

The turnaround was due to multiple factors, but a reduction of 9,092 travel miles compared to the previous season — and the ability to spend more time on the training pitch, adjusting to the new manager’s methods — likely contributed to their domestic dominance.

The following season, Chelsea once more contended with the strain of European football. Following a midweek away trip to play Qarabag in Azerbaijan, Conte acknowledged that it “was very difficult to play this game after our long travel and after no rest for my players”.

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Yet playing less European football is no guarantee of a more fruitful domestic campaign. Nottingham Forest finished a comfortable ninth in 1995-96 and reached the quarter-finals of the UEFA Cup, yet were relegated a season later despite a lighter schedule.

The logistics of getting to and from matches will never outweigh player talent and tactical intelligence. If travel alone dictated results, London-based clubs — who typically travel less due to their proximity to each other — would dominate. Instead, they have won just 25 per cent of Premier League titles.

Yet, as the football calendar continues to expand, managing travel is becoming an increasingly important performance factor.

For Smith, recognising and controlling this risk is key. “If teams can put out their best players more often, if they can elevate their performance even further from where it’s at today, that makes for more exciting competition, that makes for better games, that makes for a better product for these leagues,” he says.

Keeping physically fresh and psychologically alert is paramount in the Champions League. Minor missteps become catastrophic when faced with ruthless opposition. However, for this season at least, reduced travel should be one less distraction.

(Top photo: David Price/Arsenal FC via Getty Images)