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Europa League playoffs?


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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.

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The qualifying rounds are so heavily weighted against Scottish clubs making the group stages it all seems a bit moot now

Seems a long time ago when all Aberdeen had to was negotiate one tricky tie with Dnipro and that was us in the Group Stage 

As things stand we could potentially draw Man Utd, Valencia or Roma in round 2

Unless we take our seeding through from Round 1 

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37 minutes ago, Fuctifano said:

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.

Why the f**k reward a team for being midtable with the carrot of European football?

The incentive is there right at the start of every season, everyone knows what they need to do, f**k them if they can't. 

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9 minutes ago, tree house tam said:

Why the f**k reward a team for being midtable with the carrot of European football?

The incentive is there right at the start of every season, everyone knows what they need to do, f**k them if they can't. 

This.  

Plus as was mentioned the Europa is now a complete waste of time. 

Maybe if they introduce a diddy Mid Table Europa Cup type competition then we can talk. 

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I'm with Tam here. The season itself is the play off to get into Europe, and is the target of everyone in the top league outside the top 2 and the bottom feeders from the start.

Sadly, UEFA has messed with the European competitions so much, that the incentive and achievement of winning a place in European competition far exceeds the actual participating in it.

A good jolly for the fans in some obscure European city, and that's about it.

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Why the f**k reward a team for being midtable with the carrot of European football?
The incentive is there right at the start of every season, everyone knows what they need to do, f**k them if they can't. 
Playing devil's advocate here but the same argument applies to the lower leagues here but the promotion Play-offs are widely lauded as the best thing since sliced bread.
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6 hours ago, PauloPerth said:

I'm with Tam here. The season itself is the play off to get into Europe, and is the target of everyone in the top league outside the top 2 and the bottom feeders from the start.

Sadly, UEFA has messed with the European competitions so much, that the incentive and achievement of winning a place in European competition far exceeds the actual participating in it.

A good jolly for the fans in some obscure European city, and that's about it.

Doesn't look like Aberdeen will finish 2nd this year. 

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I think the main problem is that European football for small & medium clubs is no sort of reward and not worth playing for quite honestly - the benefits of getting there don't really exist any more (and it's possible to argue that it's actively detrimental from a financial point of view and also in terms of preparing for real games). When UEFA's mission statement is to weed out as many diddy clubs as early as possible, keep them away from the actual tournament proper and get as many proper clubs from big TV markets in there then what's the point really? 

I say this as someone who loved the trips to Dortmund, Valencia, Nancy,  Reykjavik, Athens, Odense and Bucharest that I've had in the past - but taking the fun of trips out of it, from a sporting/competitive point of view, it's now a lot of shite. Playing a game in June against a side from a smaller league and then getting fucking hammered by a much bigger club is going to get boring pretty quickly.

European football used to be simple and quite good fun - How UEFA have managed to turn it into the clusterfuck that it is now, is almost impressive. Once the "wild card" stuff comes in - we should just forget it completely. 

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2 hours ago, Archie McSquackle said:
7 hours ago, tree house tam said:
Why the f**k reward a team for being midtable with the carrot of European football?
The incentive is there right at the start of every season, everyone knows what they need to do, f**k them if they can't. 

Playing devil's advocate here but the same argument applies to the lower leagues here but the promotion Play-offs are widely lauded as the best thing since sliced bread.

We have the split, trust me it works. Only fans of clubs who cannot reach the top 6 or those who reach it then get royally pumped by the decent sides in the league say it doesn't. 

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If we're going to have playoffs, suck the Ugly Sisters into the insanity as well - playoff for the title, UCL, the Europa League spots, the whole shooting match. The meltdown in the event someone other than one of Them won the whole thing would be life affirming. And the carnage and tears if the Sister that came second won the playoffs. Ha!

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