It’s been clear since even before the twelve breakaway clubs announced the European Super League that European football doesn’t quite work.
The biggest clubs on the continent are unhappy since they don’t play the other biggest clubs enough. Big clubs from small countries seem unhappy because the playing field isn’t level. Medium-sized clubs from big countries have to be happy with just qualifying. Unless you’re a small league which gets four entrants into an early qualifying round, the entire setup seems inefficient. The Super League breakaway, while correctly shelved, will hopefully have a positive impact: forcing UEFA to make their competitions better.
Even with the Champions League reform and the brand new UEFA Conference League, one simple policy change would increase the competitiveness of European competitions. Currently, England, Germany, Italy, and Spain place four teams in the group stage of the Champions League for being at the top of the UEFA co-efficient table, taking up half of the available group stage spots. Meanwhile, clubs in countries ranked 11th through 55th do not have a guarantee of a group stage spot.
This prioritises domestic competitions over clubs. It is not enough to play well in Europe, other clubs in the domestic league you play in must also do well. This holds back clubs who consistently do well in their domestic leagues, but where the league lacks depth.
Scotland’s decline may be the best illustration of this. With Rangers declaring bankruptcy in 2012, Scotland fell from 15th place, good for two Champions League spots, to 26th by 2018, ensuring champions Celtic would start in the first or second qualifying round from 2013 onwards. With one of the two Scottish teams currently capable of progressing in Europe working their way up the lowoer divisions, Celtic made the group stage of the Champions League four times and the group stage of the Europa League six times in their ten-year span of Scottish dominance. In 2008, Celtic qualified directly for the group stage since Scotland were in 10th place. With Rangers now doing consistently well – better than Celtic, even – in Europe, Scotland again sit in 10th place.
While losing to CFJ Cluj, Ferencváros, Midtjylland, Malmö, AFC Athens, and Maribor in the preliminary rounds, as Celtic did, should necessarily preclude you from the Champions League group stage, Celtic in particular have been held back by a system which promotes countries over clubs by starting the competition at a far too early stage.
Instead, UEFA should abolish the x teams per country rule and instead seed each round of the competition based on club co-efficient. The number of qualifying spots would remain the same. For the Champions League, this would look like:
– The winners of the Europa League and Champions League get slotted into the group stage automatically.
– The winners of the top 6 leagues also get slotted into the group stage automatically – if a league winner also won the Champions League or Europa League, this group expands to 7 or 8, respectively.
– All remaining league champions are sorted by their club co-efficient. The top five teams qualify automatically for the group stage, the next two qualify for the play-off round, the next two qualify for the third qualiying round, the next four for the second qualifying round, and the remainder to the first qualifying round.
– Country co-efficients should still be used to determine the preliminary round, since none of these teams would be prejudiced by their country’s poor collective performance – one good season and they wouldn’t be in the bottom four.
– The remaining best placed teams would be sorted by co-efficient. The top 13 would make the group stage automatically, while the next five would make the third qualifying round with the remaining six in the second qualifying round.
This seems like a major change, but in reality it would affect very little. Among league champions, Red Bull Salzburg would have qualified for the group stage in place of Club Brugge – Salzburg were in the third pot, finished second in their group, and advanced, while Brugge, in the fourth pot, finished 4th. Dinamo Zagreb would move up to the play-off round from the first qualifying round, switching spots straight-up with Brøndby; Dinamo advanced to the knockout stage in second place while Brøndby finished 4th in their Europa League group and were eliminated. No other champion would move more than one round away from where they started: Slavia Prague would also move up to the play-off round, Olympiakos would move from the second round to the third, Omonia would move from the second round to the first.
There would be only two changes from the best placed teams: Milan and Wolfsburg would slide from the group stage to the third and second qualifying round, respectively, with Shakhtar Donetsk and Benfica taking their place. Milan and Wolfsburg may feel like big names, but both finished fourth in their group. While Shakhtar also finished fourth, Benfica finished second – while the finishing places don’t necessarily mean anything, the teams which would benefit from this proposal all did generally well this year, while the teams which didn’t generally didn’t.
This would have had a minimal impact on the Europa League, as well, the one issue being the cut-off would have been a tie between Real Sociedad and Real Betis, who had the same country co-efficient, with AZ Alkmaar qualifying for the group stage directly, and Randers falling into the third qualifying round in place of Czechia’s Jablonec. AZ lost to Celtic in the play-off round but then handily won their Conference League group, and both Spanish clubs predictably advanced to the knockout round. (As an aside, the Europa League’s arbitrary cut-off at the 15tth best league in Europe probably needs to be expanded as well, as Luzern, PAOK, and Partizan Belgrade would have been the next three teams in line, and the latter two especially could have qualified through to the group stage. Luzern got thumped.)
The Conference League’s impact would be similarly minimal, though Rennes and Union Berlin would slip to the second qualifying round from the play-off stage whil Basel and Copenhagen filling their spots. Interestingly, all but two of the teams in the third qualifying stage would slip into the second stage, but apart from the two group teams, no team would move more than one starting round ahead or behind.
If not much changes, how does this, in the words of the Bobs from Office Space, “fix the glitch?”
68 of the top 100 teams in the UEFA co-efficients have played in Europe each of the last five seasons. This change would effectively stack the deck in favour of clubs, regardless of where they play. This should allow for more certainty, especially for a club like Ajax which has the chance to go far in the Champions League, but which doesn’t play in a country where the depth teams can consistently churn out a good co-efficient. It also doesn’t hurt the big clubs – the teams who consistently play in the Champions League – at all. It doesn’t necessarily help them, especially if they start failing to qualify for Europe consistently, but they face no detriment and relatively little risk. It also makes every European game more important – Tottenham and Roma may not want the Conference League’s qualification to the Europa League Group Stage, but this should better incentivise those clubs to treat the European competition seriously.
This does stack the deck against teams who don’t play in Europe very often, but those teams will be less dependent on revenue from Europe and starting in a lower qualifying round is unlikely to prejudice the club that badly by allowing supporters access to more European games than they otherwise would have played. The only problem is a team finishing second may start in a qualifying round while a team finishing fourth would start in the group stage, but I do not see this as a problem, since the current reliance on fixed domestic league places fixes exactly the problem this tries to solve.
There’s a rhyme and a reason to European football. The Super League clubs made the point the same teams qualify for Europe year in, year out, but the system doesn’t currently support large markets in smaller countries. A simple and painless change would instantly improve European competition by making it more club-orientated.