Since I’m probably the only one here (or perhaps anywhere) who cares about this competition, I’ll go ahead and get this one rolling. The new third tier of European football, The Conference League, has kicked off. Arena Kombëtare (aka Air Albania Stadium, capacity 22,500) in glamorous Tirana, Albania will host the final.
The winner of the competition earns a place in next year’s Europa League and €5,000,000 in prize money.
The competition is primarily designed to offer an opportunity for European football for countries that don’t traditionally qualify for the group stages of the Champions and Europa Leagues. Therefore, only one team from the “big” European leagues is directly placed in the league, though others could drop from Europa League contention.
Some of the better known teams currently in the competition include Tottenham, Roma, Basel, Galatasaray and Celtic. I probably like Jose Mourinho more than most, but picturing him on the sidelines playing against Dinamo Batumi in Georgia or Sivassopor in Turkey later this month is kind of fun.
It will be interesting to see how seriously some of these teams take the league. On the one hand, their domestic leagues are far more important and Thursday matches don’t exactly make you want to put out a first team before a match on Saturday or Sunday. On the other, a big club getting knocked out by a third place team from Estonia or whatever would be kind of embarrassing.
I got a ticket for the second leg of the Union Berlin vAstana (KAZ)/Kuopio FS (FIN), which I’m pretty excited for. The game will be at the Olympiastadion in Berlin instead of Stadion an der alten Försterei, so that we can get 25,000 fans into the stadium and still observe Corona regulations. It will be my first trip there - I’ll try and write something up about it. It will be my first sporting event since the last time Union had a full stadium in March of 2020.
Share all the adventures of European minnows, overqualified sharks, crappy pitches and exotic locations here.
The winner of the competition earns a place in next year’s Europa League and €5,000,000 in prize money.
The competition is primarily designed to offer an opportunity for European football for countries that don’t traditionally qualify for the group stages of the Champions and Europa Leagues. Therefore, only one team from the “big” European leagues is directly placed in the league, though others could drop from Europa League contention.
Some of the better known teams currently in the competition include Tottenham, Roma, Basel, Galatasaray and Celtic. I probably like Jose Mourinho more than most, but picturing him on the sidelines playing against Dinamo Batumi in Georgia or Sivassopor in Turkey later this month is kind of fun.
It will be interesting to see how seriously some of these teams take the league. On the one hand, their domestic leagues are far more important and Thursday matches don’t exactly make you want to put out a first team before a match on Saturday or Sunday. On the other, a big club getting knocked out by a third place team from Estonia or whatever would be kind of embarrassing.
I got a ticket for the second leg of the Union Berlin v
Share all the adventures of European minnows, overqualified sharks, crappy pitches and exotic locations here.
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