Friday, March 11, 2016

European Super League 2015-16

UPDATED 5-29-16: The final standings have been added below.

Some of the richest clubs of European football have been making noise lately about permanent spots in the UEFA Champions League, or creating a closed European Super League. Naturally, I would prefer an open Super League, with promotion and relegation with the domestic leagues.

Since there are too many "big" clubs for one twenty-team league, I have created a twenty-team Super League and a second division with forty teams, split into East and West Leagues. To pick which teams are placed in which leagues, I used the UEFA Club Coefficients from the end of the 2014-15 season.

I envision these leagues playing standard double round-robins. Meanwhile, the remaining top teams in the domestic leagues would continue to play the Champions League similar to today's arrangement. The final four teams in the Champions League would thus be promoted to the Division 2 leagues, while the bottom two from each Division 2 league would be relegated to their respective domestic leagues. These relegated teams would be automatically qualified in the following season's Champions League so they have the potential for promotion as soon as possible.

Here is a map of the sixty teams in the international leagues. Click the rectangle tab thing in the upper left to get to the list where you can deselect the separate divisions.

Here are the final 2015-16 standings.

These standings include games only against teams in their division (Super League or Division 2). Note that some teams did not play any such games this season. I've positioned them based on their UEFA Club Coefficient rankings. That is the tiebreaker in general.

The four teams earning promotion from the domestic leagues, based upon who went furthest in this year's Champions League and Europa League, are: Wolfsburg, Gent, Sparta Praha, and Fenerbahçe.