My announcements on Thursday were supposed to be today's post, but oh well. So today I'll be talking about two league that I touched on briefly last week. Champions League and Europa League.These are the two biggest yearly international club tournaments. Meaning they are contested by the city level clubs not the national teams of the countries. So how do teams qualify for this and who decides how many teams from which countries get in? That is an excellent question...or questions really.
Who decides how many teams come from each country? Well there's a complex formula called the coefficent ranking, which takes into account how well your league does in international play over the last 5 years. Germany recently moved ahead of Italy in the ranking so in the 2012-13 season Germany will get an extra Champions League spot. Also due to this you may actually find yourself cheering for your teams rivals so that your league will get more spots and your team will have an easier time entering the tournaments.How does your team get in? By winning, really that's an over simplification, but (taking Germany as our example) getting 1st or 2nd place in the Bundesliga will get you into the group stages of the tournament. Getting 3rd place will get you into the 4th qualifying round of the Champions League (the one right before the group stage). (If a team is knocked out of the 4th round of the Champions League or gets 3rd in the Group stage they get sent over to Europa League.) Getting 4th or 5th in the Bundesliga or winning the DFB Cup (remember that one 64 team knockout tournament?) will get you into Europa League. Winning 4th or the DFB cup get you in at the 4th round where as 5th place gets in at the 3rd round. Yes, I know how confusing all this is. Here's the current standing in the Bundesliga so you can see who would be going where next year if the season ended today.
These two tournaments actually run most of the year. This years edition actually started in 29th June (for Champions League) and the 1st of July (for Europa). They will end on 18th of May (for Europa), and the 28th of May (for Champions League). What's more is there is actually a version in North America (I just found out last night about this.) So if you ever wondered how any of the other sports could organize something like this, there's a nice template.
Also the winners of the Champions League and the Europa League play each other in a game called the Super Cup. Thanks to this it is actually possible for one of the teams from the lowest levels of play to actually beat the champions of all of Europe. I don't think this has happened but some real underdogs break through sometimes and cause all sorts of trouble in the tournaments. In fact my other Bundesliga team Hannover 96 did this in the 1992 DFB cup before entering the Bundesliga in 2002.
Holy crap dude. And I thought my actual understanding of the NHL's mystery stat, the +/-, was kinda impressive. This reads like something a sports fan would have to compute to get into MIT.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I'm surprised no one's brought up something like this for the issues the NCAA is having with college football at the moment.
ReplyDeleteAnd yes +/- is one of those stats which makes you say "Wait what?" when you first hear about it, but it makes a strange sense.