It’s the most popular sport in the world, and second place isn’t even close. Soccer dominates everything from street corners to professional pitches across the globe. While the sport continues to grow on the professional level in the United States, mainstream soccer fandom lives elsewhere. Since its inception, each and every World Cup winner has come from either South America or Europe.

Currently, the talent is coming from these two continents, but in league play, European soccer dominates in almost every metric, in part because of their willingness to pay unprecedented amounts of money for top talent. Seeing this, FanWide began evaluating over 100 soccer clubs across 5 leagues. Eventually, we took the consensus 15 most prominent clubs from the English Premier League of England, La Liga of Spain, Bundesliga of Germany, Serie A of Italy, and Ligue 1 of France, and compiled data that has allowed us to rank the top 10 European soccer clubs.

The top 10 European soccer clubs have consistently succeeded on and off the field, balancing championship hardware and bragging rights with fan engagement and international relevance. No team on this list has one and not the other. Read below to get an inside look at how FanWide cultivated a top ten list that uses its proprietary fan data to rank teams based on more than just production on the field.