Football did not begin as a spectacle. It began as a decision. In the late nineteenth century, when professional club football first took shape, no one was thinking about legacy. There were no global audiences, no broadcasting rights, no commercial narratives to protect. There was only a belief that effort could be measured, that competition could be structured, and that what happened on cold afternoons, on uneven pitches, was worth recording.
Preston North End, Sheffield Wednesday, Wolverhampton, Notts County in England; Genoa and Pro Vercelli in Italy; Bilbao, Hamburger SV, and others across Europe — they won before winning was global headline. They dominated before dominance had a reference point. They established standards before standards existed. Their greatness was pioneering.
Whether they knew it or not, they were laying the foundations of what a professional footballer and what a professional football club would eventually become.
History, however, is not sentimental.
As football expanded, as leagues deepened and borders shifted, the game demanded new forms of strength. Some clubs adapted. Many did not. Not because they lacked ambition or intelligence, but because football, like time, does not pause to honor those who arrived first. It moves forward, layering complexity, asking each generation to prove itself again.
Over time, this produced an imbalance in how football history is remembered. Recent dominance is amplified. Early dominance is condensed into trivia. Clubs that once defined their eras are reduced to footnotes, their achievements stripped of context and judged by standards that did not exist when those achievements were earned.
This imbalance is why the Club Power Index begins.
The project was not born out of nostalgia, nor out of a desire to undermine modern greatness. The question was more basic, and more difficult: how do you speak honestly about greatness in a sport that has reinvented itself repeatedly over more than a century?
That question forces a rejection of a simple idea — that greatness is static.
In football, greatness is not a single peak preserved in memory. It is relevance across time. It is the ability of a club to absorb shocks — tactical, economic, political, cultural — and still matter.
Some clubs learned this early. Aston Villa, Juventus, AC Milan, Inter, Liverpool — they endured not because they were always dominant, but because they learned how to survive decline. They rebuilt. They recalibrated. They returned. Their histories are uneven, marked by loss and reinvention rather than uninterrupted ascent.
Others experienced the full cycle more visibly. Manchester United, Chelsea, Ajax — clubs that rose to extraordinary heights, fell sharply, and then fought their way back. Their stories are not about permanence. They are about institutional resilience. About recovery rather than myth.
And then there are the rare cases that achieved something more difficult than victory. Continuity.
Barcelona bound identity to philosophy, turning belief into something that could be inherited rather than rediscovered. Real Madrid did not dominate one era and fade from the next; it carried the mantle of champion through regime changes, expanding competitions, and modern tactical revolutions. These clubs did not simply win. They established ways of existing. The Club Power Index exists to make room for these distinctions.
Modern football discourse tends to be myopic. Who has more trophies? Who scored how many? What was the xG? These debates are engaging, but shortsighted. They ignore the context of time. They judge football history on a time scale of one or two seasons, when it is anything but. 138 years and counting actually.
The Club Power Index was built as a response to this.
Its purpose is to restore proportion, to judge football clubs on a time scale of decades and centuries. To allow early greatness to be seen without exaggeration, and modern greatness to be understood without arrogance. To acknowledge that winning a league in 1889 and winning one in 2025 are not the same — but that neither is meaningless.
At its core, this project rests on a simple conviction: football history deserves to be treated with the same seriousness we apply to other long human endeavors. We do not judge institutions, cultures, or civilizations by isolated moments alone. We look at duration. At adaptability. At influence across time.
Football should be no different.
The Club Power Index does not attempt to replace passion with numbers. It exists to give passion a framework. To ensure that when debates happen, they happen with memory intact. That when comparisons are made, they are made with humility.
This is why the index spans the entire professional era. Why it is adjusted for context. Why it resists rewarding noise over substance. And why it treats continuity as an achievement, not an accident.
Ultimately, this project is an act of respect.
- Respect for the clubs that built the game before it was global.
- Respect for the clubs that carried it through disruption and change.
- Respect for the idea that greatness is not a moment, but a relationship with time.
The Club Power Index exists to remind us of something modern football often forgets:
That the story is not about who won last. It is about who endured. Who adapted. And who remained relevant when the world around them refused to stand still.
Greatness is not what once was. It is what continues.