How the Bundesliga Could Take Serie A’s Fourth Champions League Spot

By: Daryl | September 17th, 2009

I’m not a huge fan of the UEFA Champions League group stages, especially not in the early matches as it all feels a bit pointless. The hype meets disappointment experience of yesterday’s Inter vs Barca game summed it up pretty nicely for me.

But at least there are UEFA cub-plots to keep us interested. Sub-plots like Bundesliga having the chance to overtake Serie A in the UEFA co-efficient rankings this season.

Why is that important you ask? Well, the top three ranked leagues get four Champions League spots. Number three right now is Italy, but fourth place Germany (who only got three Champions League spots) are snapping at their heels.

The current standings look like this:

Explanation: (skip this part if you don’t care)

Co-efficient points are earned by individual teams, with points awarded for reaching various stages of European competitions, as well as earning points for wins and draws along the way.

As I understand it, each team receives three points for reaching the group stage of the Champions League, and an extra point for each additional round they progress through (one for knockout round, another one for quarter-finals and so on). Europa League teams get a point for making each round from the quarterfinals onwards. On top of this, teams get two points for every game they win, one point for every game they draw (with these points halved for qualifying round games).

That gives each individual club its coefficient total for the seaosn. For each league, the total points of all teams representing that league is added together and then divided by the number of teams to get an average. And that’s that league’s co-efficient points total for the season. UEFA then adds up the previous five seasons totals to come up with the current co-efficient points total, and leagues are ranked accordingly. Like in the table above.

So, looking at the above table, Italy currently leads Germany by 6.215 points. But Italy is about to lose nearly half that advantage, as the 2004/5 season’s tally (when Italy earned 3.429 more points than Germany) will disappear next year, to be replaced by the results from this 2009/10 season.

All of which means (at least according to my calculator anyway) that if Germany teams outperform Italian teams in 2009/10 by a co-efficient points total of more than 2.786, then Germany will take four Champions League places for the 2011-12 season, and Italy will be reduced to three.