For years, four Premier League teams have been included in the Champions League every year. It’s almost always the teams that finish in the top four spots in the league that qualify. These top four spots are sought after by all the biggest clubs in the country.
Football is always evolving, with the relevant governing bodies always looking for ways to improve the most enjoyable game. The Champions League wasn’t off limits, with a revamp recently announced and brand-new rules set to take effect this season.
With the competition’s entrants expanding from 32 to 36 in a “Swiss league” format, the tournament will hand out an extra qualification place to two different countries, who collectively performed the aforementioned in the UEFA competitions the season before.
This means that if the Premier League has one of the two most impressive collective performances across the Champions League, the Europa League, and the Europa Conference League, it will be given an extra spot among the greatest tournaments in club football. It seems pretty likely that England will receive an extra spot once the rule comes into effect as well, with the Premier League having had one of the two leading collective performances across UEFA’s competitions in five of the last six seasons.
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A fine example of this is just last year, when Manchester City won the Champions League while West Ham United bested Fiorentina in the Europa League final as well, ensuring England had one of the best collective performances, with two of the nation’s clubs emerging with silverware.
If the rule had already been put in place, City, Arsenal, Manchester United, and Newcastle United would have qualified, as they did anyway in the top four places. However, Liverpool would have also joined the competition despite finishing fifth.
As has always been the case, winning the Champions League automatically qualifies a team for the tournament, regardless of their league position that year. Liverpool and Chelsea are fine examples of Premier League clubs that finished outside the top four. However, they still managed to qualify for the competition after winning the whole thing in the previous season.
Chelsea finished sixth when they won the tournament in 2012 and leapfrogged Newcastle and Tottenham Hotspur to qualify for the subsequent season’s competition.
When Liverpool won it in 2005, they were added to the tournament alongside the top four. Everton, who finished fourth, were not replaced by the Reds in a similar fashion to what happened to Spurs when Chelsea repeated the feat in 2012. Fortunately, the team has returned to a similar format as when the Reds first won it. Anyone winning the competition is now added to the tournament, rather than replacing the side that finished fourth in the league. Similarly, winning the Europa League ensures a club will feature in the Champions League in the next season, so there’s a very real chance that if England sides succeed in both the Champions League and the Europa League in the same year but both sides finish outside of the top four and miss out on the qualifying places, they will be added among the other four teams, meaning there are six English clubs representing the country that year.
Factoring that in with the new rule that will reward a country with an extra space in the Champions League if it’s had one of the best collective performances in UEFA competitions that year, there’s a very real possibility that we may see a monumental seven English sides in the tournament at some point in the near future.
If seven Premier League sides qualified for the tournament, the clubs that made it into the Europa League would, as a result, be the ones that finished lower in the table, meaning there are more opportunities for some of the league’s smaller, mid-table sides to make it into Europe.
