UEFA Europa Conference League: All you need to know about Qualifications, Format and Teams playing

UEFA Europa Conference League: All you need to know about Qualifications, Format and Teams playing

The UEFA Footballing Body is introducing a new league and competition by the name of UEFA Europa Conference League. It’s a tournament which will increase the participation of smaller teams and give them more of an opportunity to play at Europe’s top level of football.

The UEFA Europa Conference League is a being planned to start in the year 2021 and will be designed for all clubs playing in Europe. The teams will be judged on the basis of their performance in the national league and cup competitions.

Format of the Tournament

The competition will start from 2021 and will serve as the bottom tier of the already existing UEFA Europa league. Europa League is being proposed to be reduced to 32 teams at the moment.

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UEFA are reportedly introducing this new format to give equal playing chance to the lower ranked members of the UEFA Association Teams. Most of these teams were being eliminated in the prior stages of the Europa League or the Champions League.

However with the introduction of UEFA Europa Conference League, they will be able to compete with teams eliminated from the Europa League qualifiers for a place in the final tournament.

Qualification

There will be 8 groups of 4 teams each which will be followed by a round of 16, quarter finals, semi final and lastly the Finale. But before this there will a preliminary round which will be played before the R016 knockout stage.

This match will be played between the second ranked teams in the group and the teams ranked third in the Europa League group’s. A total of 141 matches will be played across 15 matche weeks.

Moreover quite similar to the UEFA Champions League, this tournament will have a related qualification round. It is going to be split into two paths – The Champions Path and the League path.

But here though the champions path will be played out between teams who have been knocked out of the qualifying round of the Champions League and been directly relegated to the UECL.

Teams Playing

A total of 184 teams are going to play the UEFA Europa Conference League. It will consist of atleast one club from 55 associations and another 46 teams from the UEFA champions league or Europa League.

No team will directly qualify for the group stages. There will be 17 teams from the UECL main path ( as explained earlier).

5 teams from the UEFA Europa Conference League Champions path and another 10 teams eliminated from the UEFA Europa league playoffs.