4th spot playoffs for champions league

Liverpool Football Club - General Discussion

Postby mart » Mon Mar 01, 2010 12:55 am

Owzat wrote:As for the Champions League, I'd rather they reduced participating teams to two from each country maximum with the winners given a place. Go back to the Cup Winners Cup as a competition, throw in runners-up with a place and then the UEFA Cup might be a stronger competition with no dropouts from the Champions League wanted or needed.

I could not agree more.

But i doubt it would happen as they want to avoid a situation where the big clubs in europe make their own superleague.
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Postby LFC2007 » Mon Mar 01, 2010 1:37 am

What gets me is that people argue for a reversion based on the idea of a universal standard of 'champion' and at the same time ridicule teams we've played - like Unirea (BUT THEY'RE CHAMPIONS  :laugh: )  - seemingly blind to the fact that these are exactly the sorts of teams that - under the old system - would come in to replace the 2nd, 3rd and 4th placed sides from Europe's top leagues. They're "sh!t", they come from "pikey" nations, BUT, they are champions :D. It's laughable.

How anyone could possibly argue that Europe's top competition would be more credible with the likes of FK Ventspils, Glentoran and Dinamo Zagreb in it - because they're champions - in place of Arsenal, AC Milan, Real Madrid and the like, because they 'only' came 2nd, 3rd or 4th in their domestic leagues, is beyond me.
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Postby mart » Mon Mar 01, 2010 7:31 am

LFC2007 wrote:What gets me is that people argue for a reversion based on the idea of a universal standard of 'champion' and at the same time ridicule teams we've played - like Unirea (BUT THEY'RE CHAMPIONS  :laugh: )  - seemingly blind to the fact that these are exactly the sorts of teams that - under the old system - would come in to replace the 2nd, 3rd and 4th placed sides from Europe's top leagues. They're "sh!t", they come from "pikey" nations, BUT, they are champions :D. It's laughable.

How anyone could possibly argue that Europe's top competition would be more credible with the likes of FK Ventspils, Glentoran and Dinamo Zagreb in it - because they're champions - in place of Arsenal, AC Milan, Real Madrid and the like, because they 'only' came 2nd, 3rd or 4th in their domestic leagues, is beyond me.

The same reason why the FA cup dont just include the big 4 clubs.
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Postby Owzat » Mon Mar 01, 2010 8:03 am

I think the problem is everyone is wrapped up in bigger = better, while the champions of Romania, Bulgaria, Latvia and Iceland might not be fashionable or produce top rate football, they do produce CHAMPIONS and that is the competition, a contest between CHAMPIONS. s*y wanted something to televise on Tuesdays and Wednesdays to fill the gap, decided that people would rather watch the Champions of Italy against the third placed English side and that's what we get. The fact that non-Champions are winning the CHAMPIONS LEAGUE does make the competition less credible, unless you change its name to the UEFA Super League or something like that then the Champions League will be devalued when teams in it aren't champions. Like the English Premiership would be devalued if the old infirm joined, or if Lyon asked to join as their league is weak. The weaker teams get filtered out quickly enough, but tv wanted more televisable games and the league format was born and for that the standard was raised.

And I find it ironic people might question the value of Champions being in the Champions League in a discussion where the teams finishing 4-7 in England would play-off and thereby put in a team that isn't much better than said Champions of Romania. They do have their place, they just get filtered out in the qualifiers or sometimes crushed in the group stages. But considering their leagues are less fashionable and have a lot less cash they do themselves proud, Debrecen may not have gone through but the teams that did (and didn't in our case from their group) spent many many times more than they did. If it had been two-legged all the way through then I reckon these teams would give much better accounts of themselves, as the pikeys from Romania did - we sure as hell were only ever comfortable because of the away goals rule.
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Postby LFC2007 » Mon Mar 01, 2010 5:44 pm

Ok it isn't a competition exclusive to champions but it does take a measure of what are - without a shadow of a doubt - the best sides in Europe, and in that sense if you win the thing then you can certainly believe it when you call your team the 'Champions of Europe'. Not the "Champions of the Champions of Europe", but the "Champions of the best sides in Europe".

Nobody will argue that "Sh!t" teams from "pikey" countries such as the much ridiculed "Urine-A" are better than any of the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th places in England, Italy or Spain and nor should they, because they clearly aren't, but still some people will ignore the blatant contradiction that arises when they argue that these teams - like "Urine-A" - make the competition more credible simply because they have won their domestic league. The smaller nations ought still to have the opportunity to participate in the competition proper and indeed all participating associations do have that opportunity; it is tiered though, to account for the fact that most of these teams often haven't gone very far in the competition, so those at the lower end have only one spot in the qualifying rounds, whereas those at the top have two go through to the group stage and two to the qualifying rounds. But if their results improve, they can gradually work their way up...like the Russian PL has done.

I suppose this idea of equivalence between national champions would be akin to comparing the goalscoring records of Kris Boyd and Alan Shearer and concluding that Boyd is a credible comparator. The difference in the standard against which they achieved their respective goalscoring records is vast, but that doesn't matter, does it?
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Postby Rush Job » Mon Mar 01, 2010 8:07 pm

I dont know why there is this constant need to "freshen up" the competitions,just to charge subsribers even more to watch a comp thats no longer as good as it was.
Leave it the fk alone you shower of b@sturds.
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Postby Owzat » Fri Mar 05, 2010 8:22 am

Got knocked on the head according to BBC teletext and from what I saw on TV, possibly ssn. Initially what I read was the big clubs (predictably) opposed such a move, but there were other factors that meant it was left - for now anyway. Further comments I've heard from people like (David?) Gold are that there was no TIME or SPACE to fit these into an already busy calendar - says it all that the person or people proposing it didn't think of that!

It exposes hypocrisy, plenty are happy to cry "it's not fair" when it suits them yet when they want to take fourth's CL place from them by an unfair play-off system, and it is unfair on those who earned that place by right and are denied any reward. It's like someone earning £300 for a week's work and someone else mugging them. I'm sure the small clubs will say it's unfair the big clubs have all the money, but it didn't start off that way and those clubs rose to the top through hard work across decades, or by a chance takeover and injection of money that could have happened and can still happen to any of them. bitters will whinge about how Heysel cost them, but other teams came through it without having to constantly whinge about it, teams that didn't do half as well as they did during the 90s.

Thankfully another stupid proposal bites the dust, maybe not for the right reasons but good riddance. File it under B1N where it belongs
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Postby KOPMATT » Mon Mar 08, 2010 11:59 pm

We got No Chance! :(
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Postby muzza798 » Tue Mar 09, 2010 1:20 am

The passing was almost as poor as the effort shown. Goodbye 4th spot
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Postby Sir Roger » Tue Mar 09, 2010 1:25 am

Im watching it now on LFCtv.
Its worse than the first time
We were SO sh'ite its untrue
:(
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Postby Owzat » Tue Mar 09, 2010 7:40 am

Well we may well all hate Monday night football, but get used to it because 2010/11 Euro Disney league, here we come! That is assuming we finish high enough to be in Europe at all, when did we last not play in Europe? (I won't answer that myself, I'll leave it to those perhaps who think "our expectation levels are 'too high' " :no:
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