When Chelsea play, say, Juventus, the crowd are singing of their travels. But not of their travels to Turin. They are singing of their travels to Leicester. The idea of an exotic, international Super League may excite some of the administrators of the game, but it is yet to lodge itself in the psyche of the average fan.

It is hard to imagine the day when Arsenal fans boo a former player for signing for Barcelona as heartily as they might boo the same player if he signed for Tottenham Hotspur.

But while the idea of a proper, de jure Super League still seems far away, is it becoming simply a fact on the ground? The complaints from Uefa officials that the Premier League is becoming too consistent, too dominated by its top four clubs, ignores an obvious possible cause. European football itself.

Is the money from the Champions League leading to a concentration in each league it touches? The Fink Tank’s Joel Minsky, Mark Latham, Dr Ian Graham and Dr Henry Stott set out to investigate.

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The team analysed games in five leagues across the Continent: the top divisions in England, Spain, Italy, France and Germany. And went back to the 1993-94 season.

Then they divided the period. For each country there was a “before” period (when the country had not yet reached its maximum number of Champions League places) and an “after” period (when it had). The aim was to see what changes had taken place between these periods and assess whether we could be reasonably certain that the Champions League was responsible for them.

The position appears clearest, at least initially, in England. In the period before the country had four Champions League places, the top four teams on average scored 73.53 points. After four were admitted, the top four scored, on average, 78.29. This is strongly statistically significant.

But were these four teams the same sides? In the “before” period, the average number of repeat appearances was 2.78. In the “after” period it was 3.33. This is not quite statistically significant. We can be only 96.4 per cent confident that the increase was not the result of mere fluctuations in the data.

Nevertheless, this data suggests firmly that increased concentration is at least in part the result of the structure of the Champions League.

Is this repeated in other European countries? Not really. In Spain, the top four clubs scored 71.00 in the “before” period and 71.08 in the “after” period. So there was virtually no difference. There has been an increase in the number of repeat appearances from 2.00 to 2.44; again, this is suggestive but not statistically significant.

In Italy, there has been a big and statistically significant increase in the number of points garnered by the top four clubs (from 71.16 to 75.56), but again the number of clubs reappearing in the elite European competition had not increased significantly.

In Germany and France, the impact was even weaker, with none of the tests showing up as significant. Indeed, in France there has been a fall in the points taken by the teams at the top and the league has begun to bunch.

The data, in other words, is too weak to justify the idea that the Champions League has taken over, concentrating football in the big boys and creating a de facto Super League. But it does suggest that things are moving in that direction. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find, if we conducted this piece of work in five years’ time, that such a de facto league was then in place.