Hannover. Not too far to travel, and just dangerous enough to stop us getting complacent (hopefully!)
And we get Ajax...even tastier. What are the odds that four of the ex CL teams would be drawn together?
Plastic ? You cheeky bastard. I have very little interest in this to be honest although it will be interesting to see if we have to take it serious for financial reasons ?
Lol, knew I'd get you with that one I doubt we'll take it very seriously - the main financial concern is always to qualify for the CL group stage as that's where the real money is made. Of the £45 million we earned last year, over half of that came just from getting into the group. Will be interesting to see if Ajax take it seriously as well - they're sitting 4th in the league right now, so earning CL qualification for next year is likely to have a higher priority for them.
I wonder what this will do to our UEFA co-efficient as well. I know at the start of this season we had the most points but I'm not sure how many we will get for (if) winning the Europa League. If I remember correctly the gap between us and Barcelona to the rest of the clubs was quite big so we should be in the top seeds should we qualify for the CL next season. Ajax is certainly a tasty draw. All of the English clubs have got really competitive ties and on paper you'd back most to win and you never know with Stoke, not certain that Valencia will be up for a cold night in Stoke.
Last season Porto got about 31.7 for winning the Europa and we got about 36.7 for CL runners up, so the difference probably won't be huge regardless of how we do. In fact, only Barca, us and Real got more ranking points than Porto last season. At the moment, I think we could hypothetically lose our number two spot to the Chavs or Bayern, but only if we went straight out of the Europa and they won the CL. So it's unlikely to do anything in the short term, and even if it did we'd still be comfortably in the top eight for a top seeding position.
He's imagining how happy he would be if Liverpool were good enough to get on terrestrial TV The way things are going, they're relying on City to win the CC for them to have a chance at being on TV next year...
Well I seem to be alone but I'm pretty excited to see the UEFA cup, I've never watched it before. Not that I wouldn't rather we were still in the champions league but I wouldn't say no to a UEFA cup, we have never won one and it would look nice alongside our European Cups and Cup Winners Cup. At last a reason to tune my telly into channel 5.
