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Football Season

It has been a while since European football started, but the end of season in most major competitions threatens the end of football far too quickly.

The football season of the year 2019-20 ends in July for most teams of Europe. In reality, we will be seeing only 48 teams competing across two competitions in August. The UEFA Champions League, which is considered by many to be the most elite tournament of the world after the World Cup, will see 4 out of the remaining 12 teams getting knocked out on the 8th of August. The other competition, the Europa League, on the other hand, will have 16 of the remaining 32 teams knocked out by the 6th of August.

There will be some one-club supporters seeing their teams going head-to-head against some of Europe’s finest. Most fans will be watching other teams that don’t mean much to them play against each other.

The UEFA Champions League sees around 110 teams from the Preliminary stages to the Finals. The Europa League sees almost the double, 220 teams participate from the preliminary stages to the Finals.

8 teams from the Champions League get relegated to the Europa League for the rest of the season. This means, around the world sees 328 unique teams from the European continent play against each other.

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Unfortunately, the games become easier to predict as the competition narrows down. Let’s take the current scenario of the UEFA Champions League, for instance. The knockout stages are played such that each team gets to play at their home pitch. So each team faces the same team twice in the knockout stages. Once when they are playing at their home pitch and the other when they visit the other team’s pitch. The scores of each game are accumulated to get a combined score, and whichever team is winning after the score is accumulated qualifies for the next round.

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These are all the matches who have played at their home front and on other’s truf. From this, we see that Atalanta beats Valencia 8-4 overall, RB Leipzig beats Tottenham 4-0 overall, Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) beats Borussia Dortmund 3-2. Overall, even after losing their first match against each other, Atletico Madrid beat Liverpool 4-2 overall. Hence, Atalanta, Leipzig, PSG and Atletico Madrid qualified for the quarter-finals. 

These matches will be played on the 8th of August with the first matches already being played.

Most people choose the team they want to support based on how they perform in these leagues or are attracted by their players, history, traditions etc. Other than that, Europe has 5 nation-leagues that get the most attention due to the teams’ glorious pasts. Leagues from England, Germany, Spain, Italy and France are the most watched world over.  

This season, France’s top-most division cancelled the rest of their season due to the ongoing pandemic and PSG were given the title for the third consecutive year. The German League ended with Bayern Munich winning the title for the eighth consecutive year. England found new champions with Liverpool winning the league after a long wait of 30 years. 

Matches for the English, Italian and Spanish leagues will end in July, after which the remainder of the Champions League and Europa League will be played.

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