European Super League 2017-18

UPDATE 5/26/18: Final standings for the season.

Some of the richest clubs of European football have made noise about permanent spots in the UEFA Champions League, or wanting to create 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. After the 2015-16 and 2016-17 seasons, two teams were relegated from the Super League to Division 2, replaced by the east and west champions. Two teams from each Division 2 league were relegated, replaced by the four teams that progressed the furthest in the Champions League and Europa League. (Ideally, this would just be the final four Champions League teams, with the relegated teams automatically qualified for the next season's Champions League so they have the potential for promotion as soon as possible).

PSV Eindhoven was relegated from the Super League to Division 2 West. Zenit Saint Petersburg was relegated from the Super League to Division 2 East. Liverpool and Shakhtar Donetsk were promoted to the Super League. Wolfsburg, Celtic, Salzburg and Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk were relegated to their respective domestic leagues. Leicester City, Celta de Vigo and Borussia Mönchengladbach were promoted to Division 2 West. Monaco was promoted to Division 2 East.

To keep the Division 2 leagues with even teams, Basel 1893 was moved from the West to the East, since Basel is east of Mönchengladbach.

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 standings.

The standings include games only against teams in a team's division (Super League or Division 2). Borussia Monchengladbach did not play any such games this season. The first tiebreaker is the number of games played. The second tiebreaker is the UEFA club coefficient rankings.

The four teams promoted from the domestic leagues are the four teams (that aren't above) who progressed the furthest in the Champions League and Europa League. Since no "new" team advanced to the knock-out round of the Champions League, all four are from the Europa League: Lokomotiv Moskva, RB Leipzig, Salzburg, and Ludogorets 1945, who have the highest coefficient of the teams eliminated in the round of 32.