W e counted them out. And we counted them back in again. Which didn’t, it must be said, actually take very long. Arsenal’s near-inevitable defeat in Barcelona on Wednesday, sequel to Chelsea’s semi-inevitable defeat by Paris Saint-Germain , and backed up by Tottenham’s elimination at the hands of Borussia Dortmund on Thursday have at least clarified things. The Premier League is almost certain to be left with two surviving representatives in the last 16 standing come Friday’s draws for the quarter-finals of the Champions and Europa League.

In this respect it hasn’t exactly been a bad season for the domestic league abroad, more a familiar ferreting at the fringes, a maintenance of the new European status quo. Eight English teams were there at the start of things in August. West Ham and Southampton went early. Manchester United were the big disappointment, although Wolfsburg’s progress since suggests the horror in some quarters at a rich and famous English team losing to a relative mid-ranker overlooks the fact the Bundesliga is Europe’s second most powerful league and Germany are the world champions.

Chelsea and Arsenal were outplayed by superior teams in the knockout rounds. Tottenham chose to give themselves only half a chance against a seriously good, seriously motivated Dortmund. City deserve real credit not so much for beating a wretched Dynamo Kyiv as for earning the right to do so by topping their group after losing their opening home fixture. They are a strange team right now, an end-of-era affair, with a zany, depleted defence and genuine craft and edge elsewhere. Plus of course this dying regime has little to lose now. From here there are only two, perhaps three teams City will really fear. With a decent draw there is no reason they couldn’t go on to the final. Which may or may not be a good idea depending on your view of that mix-and-match defence testing its weak points against Barcelona’s otherworldly attacking trio, the football equivalent of riding out to face the three musketeers with a breadstick in each hand.

For now this feels like a solid B score. Such is the packaging of the Premier League there is always a temptation to demand more, to howl and whinge and fret at the failure to dominate. Instead English football has ? in manager-speak terms ? justified its coefficient. Which is no small thing in itself at a low point in the overall quality of the best teams.

For now the battle to stay ahead of Italy and retain four Champions League spots has been narrowly won. Juventus’ 2-0 half time lead at Bayern Munich had looked a potential coefficient-buster. Happily for the Premier League the new superclub order asserted itself here too as Bayern flexed their shoulders and struggled through . Lazio are the only Italian team left in Europe, with a likely home leg progression against Sparta Prague on Thursday night. Not bad, Serie A. But for now they’ll be dancing in the streets of narrowly maintained Uefa percentage point Anglo-supremacy.

Unsurprisingly La Liga remains out in front here by some distance, although it is worth noting the old sneer about a two-team league simply doesn’t stand up given the mob-handed seven-club Spanish presence in Europe this week. With Bayern and Wolfsburg still in the Champions League and Dortmund many people’s favourites to win the B competition this looks an unarguable statement of current strength.

Premier League spin doctors (paid and amateur) will perhaps continue to point to the competitive nature of many fixtures here, the fact that only in England are the top six so likely to lose to clubs in the bottom half of the table. This is usually presented as an indication of strength. It is an odd argument in itself. A more logical position would be to suggest the top six lose more often because they’re not particularly good.

The wider question is whether any of this actually matters. To a club football neutral there is something quite reassuring in the fact the Premier League can’t simply splurge and panic and undercook its way to the very top. The presence of clubs from 11 leagues in this week’s round of games is an indication of an open field, a reassuringly elite standard to be reached. A presence must be earned. Perhaps there are even some lessons to be learned from the current spread.

As ever the almost total absence of English players and managers from the elite stage of European club football stands out. In many ways the global cosmopolitanism of the Premier League is fascinating. Less convincing is the failure of the richest league in the world to make or produce or create anything of any substance that is truly its own. Its last remaining presence in the Champions League is an Emirati-funded club managed by a Chilean without a single starting English outfield player in its last game in the competition. Raheem Sterling and Joe Hart are the only on-field presence remaining. English football may still be at the party. But it hasn’t brought any booze, doesn’t know anyone and isn’t showing any signs of wanting to dance.

The most obvious sadness about this is simply that these competitions are clearly of some relevance to the population of England: a football crazed, history-rich, economically powerful nation that believes itself to be central to the one really global sport, but which in reality is increasingly a passive consumer, a couch potato nation with a bulging wallet, waving its Messi flag, doffing its cap to the visiting dignitaries.

Perhaps English football’s ability to participate a little more, not simply as a stage, a service provider, but as an actual manufacturer of talent, might lie in its ability to learn from the success it sees in front of it. For example it has been suggested Leicester City will struggle in Europe next season. But why would they? Right now Leicester look a bit like the kind of team that regularly bamboozles, or keeps pace with, English football’s richest clubs in Europe: well-organised, tactically coherent, a team not a collection of soldered-on stars. Intangibles of stage fright and inexperience aside, why would Leicester fare any worse in European competition than the eight teams they currently lead in the league?

At the other end of the scale, watching Barcelona’s effortlessly high-grade defeat of Arsenal at the Camp Nou, it is worth acknowledging that the current champions are simply a class apart. This is an inimitable model. There are aspects here that will always lie beyond: a coherent playing culture, a driving regional identity, the ability not just to make top-class players but to buy them and make them better, which is harder than it sounds. Somewhere in between there is a middle path, some perfect mix of development and relentless acquisition. For now it has simply been a middling season for English clubs in Europe, parity at a time of retrenchment.