UEFA Conference League: The Third Tier of European Football Explained
Jim James
The UEFA Conference League is the third tier of European Football that is going to be introduced in the 2021-22 season, it will go to 2023-24 and UEFA will see how it goes from there. It was revealed to the world on December 2 2018. The qualifying system is very different than all of the other competitions.
You see, this qualification system relies heavily on the UEFA country coefficients, with the teams from the rankings 1-5 getting only one team, 6-15 getting 2 teams, 16-50 getting 3 teams, and 51-55 getting 2 teams.
It seems like a good system, but the big 5 leagues will only get combined 5 teams, which doesn’t seem like a good thing for tv revenue, and for when the fans get back to the stadiums, ticket revenue, which is what big organizations like UEFA want. A bottom line.
There is going to be 1 team from Lictenstein in the qualifiers. We could see something called FC Balzers in Europe and not Wolves or Everton or someone like that. Personally I would like to see Everton vs Montpellier battle their hearts out for their first spot in Europe in years instead of Djurgardens and Dundalk. The former would get me interested, the latter, not so much. There’s even a team in the Georgian second tier in it
That could be the one major flaw in the UEFA Conference League, but other than that I am super excited to see another European Competition, giving another set of fans a shot to see their teams in Europe.
Another Competition I think could change is the UEFA Super Cup. It was formerly the Champions League winner vs the Europa League winner. If it changes, It could probably go one of two ways; one, my favorite being that they go through a round robin format, with each team playing each other once for a total of 3 games, then the team with the best record getting a bye to the final, and the two other teams playing for the final, then the final takes place, but option number two, and this is how I think it is going to go: The Europa Winner and the Conference winner play in a semi final to play the CL winner.
Now here is how the tournament works: In the Group stage 10 Europa league play-off losers automatically go to the groups, and just like the champions league, the 3rd place group finishers go to the knockout stages of the Conference.
I think the Conference is going to be a nice addition to European Football. Even though the qualification is a little shaky, I think that it will work.