What exactly is the Europa League? It’s a second tier competition meant for those “losers” that miss out of competing in the Champions league. It means less T.V revenues, it means playing on a Thursday night (less recovery for league fixtures) and it means that you have to have two full squads in order to keep up with the competition. The Europa League has two extra legs in comparison to the Champions league and the overall prize money for the winner is only 5 million euros compared to 35 million for just qualifying into the Champions league.
The key issue to me seems to be the lay over time between European matches and league matches. Ultimately, if you do not win league matches you do not get into the champions league, however, the way the system works, coefficients for champions league victories are practically the same for Europa league victories, meaning teams of leagues that focus on their domestic league such as Italy, get slaughtered to leagues such as Germany.
Italy has lost its additional champions league spot over the past two years for this exact reason. While Italian clubs have done better in the Champions League than the Germans, the Germans nonetheless, consistently have three teams in the late stage of the Europa league, so the question remains is it more important to have the strongest teams in Europe (e.g In 2009-10, German clubs outscored Italian clubs by 2.6 coefficient points even though Internazionale won the competition, a huge margin[1])? Or do we want to see well-rounded leagues?
Personally, I see a well rounded league as fiscally impossible, while we can have a stronger competition towards the top in leagues like the Portuguese Superliga, La Liga and Ligue 1, it seems pretty much impossible that six or seven teams could be challenging for a league title, except in a fiscally uneven playing field like England.
The main issue here is that many leagues feel very differently about the Europa league, as it offers no economic incentive. The Dutch, the Russians and the Italians are key example of this. Italians feel there is a sense of injustice, and it stems from the methodology of the coefficient. Germany, the argument goes, has only overtaken Italy by its strong performance in the Europa League, a competition that has traditionally been taken less seriously in Italy due to economic benefit. It is argued that teams such as Udinese, cannot afford to give it there all in the Europa league as ultimately there league performance outweighs the importance of Europa. It might be time for Michel Platini to sit down and reform the competition as a whole.
