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Chatting about this at work yesterday…10 of the 54 nations in UEFA have these now, what do folk think of them, better incentive for mid-table clubs and especially a carrot for finishing top of the bottom 6 or hideously unfair and rewarding failure? In terms of structure, it would mean the Scottish Cup final wouldn’t be the last game of the season (though not sure if the lower league play offs run past it at the moment, think they do) as if for example this season Hearts win the cup then they’d be exempt from the playoffs and whoever finishes 3rd would be in them, whereas if Celtic win the cup then 3rd would qualify for the EL automatically and the playoffs would be between 4th and 7th for the last spot. As this isn’t (yet) a league reconstruction topic, we can discard the utterly wild ones in Belgium where 7th through 15th at the split plus the top 3 in tier 2 play off for the right to play 4th for the final place (seriously), and similarly the Czech league which now splits into 3 leagues of 6, 4, and 6, with the middle part being EL playoffs (I know). Netherlands and Austria in addition to those 2 as they have an extra European place due to coefficient, and Bulgaria and Denmark as they have a league of 14. So the closest models would be Northern Ireland, Wales, Slovakia, and Finland. All have 12 team leagues with splits, though everyone bar Northern Ireland plays 2 pre-split rounds and 2 post for 32 fixtures, whereas the NI league mirrors ours in structure as well as religious intolerance. Finland, 3rd gets a bye to the final, 4 plays 7 and 5 plays 6, those winners play off to face 3rd. For the other 3 countries, there’s no bye to the final but it appears 4 plays 7 and 5 plays 6 ,provided one of the top 3 win the cup), with the higher ranked team having home advantage. I quite like the idea of these as something else to play for (not that my own team is likely to be near them any time soon, although we could have been a couple of years ago), but I think if they were brought in there would have to be more of a reward for finishing higher up rather than home advantage in a one off game.