The top 30 leagues in world football have been ranked by Opta Power Rankings and it makes for some very interesting results. You probably won't be too surprised to see the Premier League lead the way with the English top-flight pulling away from their rival European competitions due to their vast riches. That dominance has been seen in European competitions in recent years. In five of the last six seasons, there has been an English side competing in the Champions League final with three English winners. Manchester City won the competition last season and are undoubtedly the best side in Europe right now. Meanwhile, West Ham won the Europa Conference League last campaign.

So if the English Premier League is the strongest, you'd imagine the Spanish La Liga is second. But you'd be wrong. In fact, Spain's top flight is down in fourth place. It means that Germany's Bundesliga comes in second with a ranking of 84.04. That may come as a surprise but Bayern Munich are one of the greatest sides in European football while Borussia Dortmund regularly reach the latter rounds of the Champions League. Eintracht Frankfurt also won the Europa League in the 2021/22 season. Serie A comes in third place despite Juventus falling away from being one of the best sides on the continent. Instead, Napoli, AC Milan and Inter Milan - who reached last season's Champions League final - lead the way in the division. Roma and Fiorentina were also losers in the Europa League and Europa Conference League finals respectively. Then comes La Liga with Barcelona and Real Madrid perhaps not quite being the European superpowers they were a few years ago, while the same can maybe be said about Atletico Madrid. France's Ligue 1 comes fifth with Paris Saint-Germain dominating that division in terms of quality with Lens, Marseille and Rennes making up the league's top four last season.

So, which league is the best of the rest outside the big five? Incredibly, it's actually England's second-tier, the Championship, that ranks in sixth in terms of quality with a ranking of 78.58. This season, the Championship includes huge clubs such as Leicester, Southampton, Leeds and Sunderland and is ranked as stronger than the Dutch Eredivisie, who are seventh in the ranking. The Eredivisie have been decimated this summer with many of their star players leaving for pastures new. Mohammed Kudus, Jurrien Timber, Edson Álvarez and Calvin Bassey all left Ajax for the Premier League this summer while PSV lost Ibrahim Sangaré to Nottinham Forest.

But the Eredivisie still ranks above the Portuguese top-flight - the Primeira Liga - who are in eighth with a ranking of 77.20. Porto, Benfica and Sporting dominate that league often but the three clubs rarely trouble the latter stages of European competitions these days. Rounding off the top 10 are the Belgian Pro League and the Brazilian Serie A.

One of the most interesting aspects of the 30-league ranking is that the MLS is placed in 15th, well above the Saudi Pro League which finds itself in 27th position. Lionel Messi made the move to MLS to join Inter Miami and has started his career in America in incredible fashion. If you want to know what sort of standard the MLS is, well it finds itself between the Danish Superliga and the Austrian Bundesliga in the ranking.

While the Argentine is making it look incredibly easy in the MLS, his Inter Miami side are still bottom of the table showing the league's quality. So what other players are there in the league? Well, 22-year-old Thiago Almada who plays for Atlanta United is extremely highly-rated. The likes of Austin's Sebastian Driussi, Orlando City's Facundo Torres and Nashville's Hany Mukhtar are among the best players in the league. You've also got former Barcelona wonderkid Riqui Puig, who plays for LA Galaxy and Italian Lorenzo Insigne who plays for Toronto.

And despite all the money and all of its spending, the Saudi Pro League only just makes it into the top 30 in 27th place. Cristiano Ronaldo was the first player to move over to the league but has since been joined by *deep breath* Ruben Neves, Kalidou Koulibaly, N'Golo Kante, Jordan Henderson, Fabinho, Karim Benzema, Edouard Mendy, Marcelo Brozovic, Roberto Firmino, Sergej Milinkovic-Savic, Malcom, Riyad Mahrez, Allan Saint-Maximin, Sadio Mane, Franck Kessie, Neymar, Aleksandar Mitrovic, Otavio, Aymeric Laporte and Gabri Veiga amongst others. But despite all those star players, it hasn't done enough to raise the league's ranking in Opta's eyes just yet. But there's no doubt that, given a few more transfer windows, the Saudi Pro League will have as much quality as some of the best leagues in the world.

Ronaldo is convinced that the Saudi League is only going to improve and will soon be rocketing up this ranking. Before this summer's transfer window, he insisted that European leagues were losing their quality and that the Saudi League was 'much better' than MLS. He said: "Returning to Europe, for me, is a closed possibility, I'm already 38-and-a-half years old and... it's not worth it.

"Europe lost a lot of quality. The only one that is one of the best is the Premier League. The Spanish league lost its level, the Portuguese one is not 'top', the German one also lost a lot of quality. The USA? No, the Saudi championship is much better than the USA. In one year, more and more top players will come to Saudi. In a year, the Saudi league will overtake the Turkish league and Dutch league."

The top 30 leagues in the world according to Opta

Well, according to Opta, it still has plenty of work to do. Check out the full ranking of the top 30 leagues in world football right now, as per Opta.