Brentford manager Keith Andrews.placeholder image
Brentford manager Keith Andrews. | Getty Images
A club could be required to deliberately lose to Liverpool to make the Champions League - and how it could happen.
As the Premier League season draws to a close, much of the focus will be on the teams competing for the final European places – and, in particular, the five qualification spots for next season’s Champions League.
At least five English teams will qualify for Europe’s biggest competition thanks to UEFA’s European Performance Spot (EPS) rules. Arsenal, Manchester City and Manchester United have all confirmed their places, with Liverpool and Aston Villa in pole position to secure the final two places in the top five.
But there’s an unusual wrinkle in the calculations this year: If Aston Villa win the Europa League, then there could be six qualifiers – and Brentford could theoretically be in a bizarre position in which they need to lose in order to make it into the Champions League.
Why Brentford might need to lose to Liverpool to qualify for the Champions League
The reason that this strange scenario could come about is because of the counterintuitive way that UEFA determines the means by which teams are considered to have qualified for the Champions League: There’s an order of priority to it.
If a team finishes in an automatic qualifying spot - the top four, in the case of the Premier League - then that comes first. Qualifying by winning the Europa League comes second, and then qualifying via the EPS comes third.
In other words, were Aston Villa to win the Europa League and finish in the top four as well, then they would have officially qualified due to their top four placing, not as Europa League winners. In this instance, the extra EPS place goes to fifth, with no team qualifying because of the Europa League.
The extra place would be awarded by UEFA coefficient ranking, and wouldn’t go to any of the teams in contention for sixth place as none have competed in Europe recently and thus won’t have a good enough coefficient.
If, however, Aston Villa finish fifth or lower and win the Europa League, then they enter the Champions League as Europa League winners, the top four qualify by right, and the EPS place will be given to the Premier League team with the next best finish. So in this precise scenario only, England gets six places.
So teams like Brentford, Brighton and Bournemouth, who are competing for a top-six berth, need Aston Villa to win the Europa League and fail to make the top four. In that scenario, one of them will make it as well.
Where this scenario could get really interesting is on the final day of the season. The Europa League final will already have taken place the Wednesday before, so we’ll know if Villa have won it or not – and with Brentford set to play Liverpool in the last round of fixtures, they could need to lose to Liverpool in order to ensure that they finish above Aston Villa in the league and make sure that the EPS spot passes down to sixth.
Is it likely that Brentford will want to lose to Liverpool?
The truth is that although this scenario is plausible, it’s by no means likely – not least because Aston Villa may well not win the Europa League. They are heading into the second leg of their semi-final against Nottingham Forest with a 1-0 aggregate deficit, and would need to beat Forest and then either SC Freiburg or Braga.
If that doesn’t happen, then this isn’t a scenario which can happen in the first place. Even if Villa do win the Europa League, then the odds that the table falls in such a way that Brentford want to lose are rather low.
Aston Villa and Liverpool’s results will have a big impact, and they’re due to play each other on the penultimate weekend, increasing the odds that there’s a big enough gap between the two that the result of Liverpool v Brentford is inconsequential.
But even more relevant is the fact that Brentford would have to be in a position in which they know that they can finish sixth even with a defeat at Anfield. Losing to Liverpool to keep Aston Villa out of the top four wouldn’t do much good if it just allowed Brighton, Bournemouth, Chelsea or another team to leapfrog them into sixth anyway.
So the only way this scenario plays out is if Aston Villa win the Europa League, remain tight on points with Liverpool on the final day, and Brentford win their matches against both Manchester City and Crystal Palace while the teams around them lose their coming games. It’s a relatively far-fetched proposition, albeit not one that’s impossible.
There are also Premier League rules which require a team to field a full-strength side for matches, which might make it more difficult for Brentford to feel able to put out a deliberately weakened side if they did find themselves incentivised to lose, while more general rules around bringing the league into disrepute could be a factor, too – although there doesn’t appear to be a specific rule in the league handbook which prevents a team from not playing to win.
Regardless of the rules, it’s extremely unlikely that Brentford will want to lose to Liverpool on the last day of the season – but it’s not completely impossible either, and could set up a hugely intriguing and potentially controversial end to the campaign. Just don’t hold your breath waiting for this particular piece of drama to take place.
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