UEFA European club competitions have reached the quarter-final stages and as the competitions intensify, it’s now not only the question of who’s winning the titles but also which league gets additional spots for 2025/26 European competitions. Surprised? We are speaking about the UEFA Coefficient factor, the additional reason why these competitions matter a lot. We will explain this later in the blog.
Talking about the new format of UEFA European competitions, it seems to have worked with a largely positive feedback about the model. At least two things have definitely stood out:
- Increase in revenue for each Champions League participating club. Till the entry in quarter-final stage, each of the 8 Champions League teams have earned anywhere between £70mn – £85mn. That is a quite a significant amount of money.
- The fight for a Champions League spot will be more vicious in the domestic league.
In this blog, we look at the UEFA Coefficient and status-till now in the fight for the 25/26 European competition qualification and a closer look at the eight teams qualified for the 24/25 quarter-finals.
UEFA Coefficient
The UEFA coefficients are statistics based in weighted arithmetic means used for ranking and seeding teams in club and international competitions. Illustrating with an example, since from 24/25 UCL, the number of participating teams have been increased from 32 to 36, how does one find the extra 4 teams to participate. One additional spot is given to the association in fifth place in the country coefficient rankings. Another additional spot is given to the ‘champions path’ qualifiers, where winners of domestic leagues without a direct group stage ticket battle it out every year. The remaining two additional spots are where UEFA Coefficient comes in. The spots are given to the associations with the best collective European performance in the previous season. The rankings are determined by points gained by European clubs across the current season’s UEFA Champions League, UEFA Europa League and UEFA Conference League competitions.
The status at the end of first round of quarter-final matches in the 24/25 UEFA competition season makes sure that England is now guaranteed a top-two spot in UEFA’s association club coefficient rankings and this means, now five teams will qualify for the Champions League from the usual four. Of course, that could increase based on English teams winning Europa League and so on. The other league who’s close to securing an additional spot is the Spanish LaLiga.
This leads to a close fight in their domestic leagues rankings which lead to grabbing that extra spot. And every league teams would go all out to grab that spot leading to a more tightly and viciously contested domestic league matches.
Teams in Quarter Finals
Across the three European competitions, Premier League, with 5 teams, has the highest number of teams with a combined squad market value of €4.21bn out of which two teams are each in Champions League and Europa League and Chelsea FC being the representative in Conference League. The picture in league terms showing the number of teams representing with their combined squad market value can be shown as:
Polish Ekstraklasa with two teams and a combined squad market valuation of €66mn lead the balance participating teams. Five other leagues, each represented by one team, constitute the remaining.
Champions League 24/25 QF Teams
The eight teams in the 24/25 Champions League quarter-finals comprise of clubs from the ‘big five’ leagues. Hardly surprising! Two teams each from the Premier League, LaLiga, Bundesliga and one team each from Serie A and Ligue 1 fill the eight spots. Each of the eight clubs have been consistently featuring in the Deloitte Football Money League list of highest revenue generating clubs.
Combined, the eight clubs have a total revenue of €5.3bn which is approximately 14% of the total European football revenue comprising of ‘big five’ European leagues, Non-‘big five’ top leagues, ‘Big five’ countries’ other leagues FIFA, UEFA and National Associations Non-‘big five’ other leagues as per data from Deloitte Annual Review of Football Finance.
The other interesting thing about of these eight teams is the strength of their commercial income. Combined, their commercial revenue stream contributed to about 44% of their total revenue and 31% of the combined commercial revenue of the entire clubs belonging to the big five leagues in 22/23. Further, testament to their global popularity comes from the 1.3bn combined social media followers of the eight teams.
In terms of kit suppliers, the battle of the eight teams also translates into a battle predominantly between Adidas with 4 teams and Nike with 3 teams. Puma supplies kits to one remaining team, Borussia Dortmund.
In Conclusion
As the teams battle out for their share of glory, the ongoing quarter final round two matches along with the upcoming games is much-awaited event. Of course, it doesn’t need to be said about the excitement the high-energy matches will generate.
Fans are sure to be in for a treat!
