Europa League gets serious with Champions League prize up for grabs
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Version 0 of 1. This is the time of year when football gets serious. The nights are getting lighter, midweek fixtures are no longer the trudge through darkness they were a few weeks ago, the games are coming thick and fast, the Champions League is back and – just so you know that things can never be perfect – so is Thursday night action in the form of the Europa League. This column will never be a fan of Thursday night football – there is just no need or demand for it – but that is not to say the Europa League has absolutely nothing going for it at the moment. While still all too clearly the ill-formed brother of the Champions League, so sadly lacking in social graces that Uefa will not let it out on Tuesday or Wednesday nights, the Europa League at least becomes a proper contest played by normal knockout rules in mid-February. As of now, there are no more Champions League failures to be parachuted in to distort the balance of the competition, and the tiring group stage is over. OK, the Europa group stage is perhaps no more tiring than the Champions League group stage, but it is played out on Thursday nights, sometimes against teams that you need Google to locate, and that always seems to make a difference come Sunday in the Premier League. There are now just 32 teams left, in just over a week there will be 16, and so on all the way to the final. The Europa League has stopped being complicated and arduous, and can now be followed as a complementary side dish to the main course of the Champions League. Which is just as well, because the big change this year is that the Europa winners gain a place at the Uefa top table next season. There are a few terms and conditions – should a team win the Champions League and fail to finish in a qualifying position they will take the automatic place and the Europa League winners will have to be content with a play-off round – but in most seasons from now on the Europa League winners can expect a place in the Champions League group stage the following season. What that is likely to mean before long is that one of the major leagues could have a five-team representation in the Champions League. Tottenham or Liverpool, for example, could qualify for next season’s Champions League by winning this season’s Europa, even if they finish outside the top four. Everton could conceivably qualify for the Champions League and get relegated, admittedly a doubly distant prospect but one to send a shiver down the spine of Roberto Martínez after his bittersweet final season at Wigan. The interesting thing about the development is that many a team will end up conflicted about where their best route of advancement lies. This is natural, because the Europa League is made up of sides who narrowly missed out on Champions League qualification and who can be expected to be in the mix again the following season. What has been happening in recent seasons is that some teams have been forced to make a choice between going all out to win the Europa League and giving themselves the best chance of finishing in a Champions League berth in their domestic league. The Europa League has often ended up the loser in that trade-off, the Champions League has almost all the glamour and kudos, and Uefa has recognised this and ostensibly attempted to strike a balance. You never know quite where you are going to end up with incentive engineering of this sort, and while the Europa League should certainly be improved by being awarded a much more meaningful prize, the effect on the Premier League is harder to guess. Take the present top six: Chelsea, City, United, Southampton, Arsenal and Spurs, in that order. Chelsea and City, one imagines, are nailed on for a top-four finish and need never think about the Europa League for a very long time. United and Southampton have no European distractions this season and can qualify for the Champions League only by virtue of a top-four placing. Arsenal are still in this season’s Champions League and not yet certain of a place the next time round, while Spurs, like Liverpool below them, are still aiming for a top-four berth but have an additional route to success that could look more appealing if the first couple of knockout rounds are successfully negotiated. United, to take an example at random, play Spurs then Liverpool at the end of March. Ordinarily these would be crunch fixtures, games to sort out the top ranking in English football, and in the old days Spurs and Liverpool might well have ditched their Europa League aspirations in favour of valuable league points against a top four rival. Might that dynamic subtly change this season, if Liverpool or Spurs are looking at a different goal? Perhaps March is a little too early, but if Spurs are still in the Europa in May, by which time they would be looking at a semi-final, what will their priorities be when Manchester City are the visitors in the penultimate home match of the season, and will other sides involved in the title/top-four race have a point of view should European considerations distort what should be one of the domestic league’s games of the season? In a sense this is nothing new: come the end of the season leading teams are always having to juggle priorities between cup, league and Europe, and anything that adds extra interest probably ought to be welcomed. Yet one could take a more sinister view. The Champions League has already totally eclipsed the magic of the FA Cup – for leading clubs, that is, not for the likes of Bradford or Reading – and resulted in a Premier League where the same coterie dominates each year and mostly manages to shut the rest out. If football is not quite as open and exciting as it used to be, if your team has not won anything for years and now counts mere top-tier survival as success in itself, that is the Champions League’s fault. So obviously what we now need is a stronger, more enticing Europa League. In a few years, by which time Uefa will undoubtedly be awarding Champions League places to both Europa finalists and even more clubs will be tempted to concentrate on Europe at the expense of their domestic campaigns, it may be possible to look back fondly on a time when the secondary competition was regarded as a harmless joke, played out on Thursday evenings. As long as it continues on a Thursday it will still be a bit of a joke to many, but it might not be quite as harmless. |