UEFA European Football Forum

San Marino and Andorra only receive 2 Europa League slots whereas all the other countries receive 3 slots. I believe they used to only receive 1 EL slot. Gibraltar only receive 1 Europa League slot. Is this because they are the last 3 teams in the Access List and it's an incentive to improve, so if ...

2 - in my opinion league averages depend a lot on individual situations namely due to promotions / relegations. This... Scotland a good example. Here are our tier 1 averages under current structure. SCOTTISH TIER 1 2000-01 ... 15,724 2001-02 ... 15,998 2002-03 ... 15,541 2003-04 ... 15,226 2004-05 ...

England and France gave slots to the League Cups long before Michel Platini came on the scene. England began in the late 1960s when it was still called the Fairs Cup. Scotland also did so from the 1970s until CWC was abolished in 1999. I don't know if any others did. Since CWC was abolished, the onl...

What I fail to understand though, is why cup-winners get higher priority in the Europa League than league placings. The qualification of domestic cup runners-up to EL was probably a "misprint" from the good old Cup Winners' Cup. I don't know whether UEFA had kept that for several years fo...

Lyonnais wrote:In France, the game is replayed in full (starting at 0-0) as if the initial game had never been played.

Same in the UK, replayed afresh.

(Note: yellow/red cards in the abandoned game count for suspensions etc).

Motherwell bottom of the Scottish Premiership would this be as big as Hibernian being Relegated? I think the size of Scottish teams ... I dont know where Motherwell fit in with terms of club size but they were near the top for a few years only recently. Motherwell would be 7th/8th biggest, alongsid...

Great news for a lot of clubs recently, profits for St Johnstone and ICT too.

Hibs, Kilmarnock and Aberdeen have also cleared / restructured their debt.

Hearts and Dunfermline have overcome their financial crises.

Motherwell and St Mirren have been looking at fan ownership.

Apparently not. BBC article now has an extra line at bottom saying: Meanwhile, the Scottish Professional Football League is satisfied that no default event has occurred in relation to the winding-up order. A default event, according to the SPFL's rule E20, occurs 28 days after a tax bill is due.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/30678270

Rangers take £500k emergency loan, to avoid being wound-up over late tax.

Anyway, in Scotland the stats for Saturday adult male XI-aside teams doing a normal season (August-May as opposed to over the summer) are: * 111 in Senior football (Scottish, Highland, Lowland, East & South leagues) * 161 in Junior football (3x regions, 6x districts) - 'Junior' means lower, not ...

According to the FIFA Big Count 2006, the Armenians had 656 professionals (which probably means players getting some pay... not necessarily full-time footballers alone) and 37,228 amateurs. With 80 clubs fielding 178 teams. Obviously those figures don't tally - presumably a lot of the amateurs are i...

League Cups. Finland: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Finnish_League_Cup Iceland: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Deildabikar You were saying the cup groups idea might be considered by other summer leagues, like Sweden has. I was observing that some already open with groups, but in a League Cup....

Iceland and Finland already do League Cups with groupstages played at the start of the season - so I suppose all that Sweden has done is operate some variant of that idea. In the UK there has been limited history of groupstages and little successful experience. I think the idea would be opposed by c...

A jail free card for New Zealand? :lol: Sure, why not? Because they don't deserve it. It's roughly the equivalent of something like having 8 groups in Europe to send 12 teams (8 winners, 4 playoffs) and then having every cycle Northern Ireland in a group with San Marino, Andorra and Gibraltar for o...

I'm not sure groupstages in cups would be more attractive for fans, it could be more repetitive and boring (especially if eliminated early). More fixture congestion, too, especially in UK. When UEFA grew the number of CL slots for big leagues to 3-4 in 1999, and abolished the Cup-Winners' Cup, they ...