How Five Premier League Teams Can Qualify For Champions League 2024/2025

What if I told you that the English Premier League could have 5 teams in the UEFA Champions league in the 2024/2025 season? Yes, for the first time in the history of the Champions League, the English Premier League could have five representatives. In fact, the English Premier League could possibly have seven teams in next season’s Champions League, though this is very unlikely but possible.

Since the Europa League winner started getting an automatic ticket into the group stage of the UEFA Champions League, only the Spanish La Liga and the German Bundesliga have had the opportunity to have five team representatives in the competition after Sevilla (in different occasions) and Eintracht Frankfurt won the Europa League but finished outside the top four in their domestic leagues.

Though, the Premier League’s chance to have five teams in 2024/2025 Champions League through having a Europa League winner seems very unlikely as Liverpool who is the only English side left in the Europa League looks certain to finish in the top four in the domestic league, it can still have five representatives in the competition next season, thanks to UEFA Champions League new rules and format changes.

The new format which would take effect from next season would see the competition have 36 teams from the beginning of the tournament instead of the usual 32. This means that 4 more teams are expected to enter the tournament through a format explained in the following paragraphs of this post.

2 out of the four additional teams to enter the competition will come from 2 domestic leagues with the best performance by their clubs in the previous season of the UEFA Champions League. This is determined by total coefficient points obtained by the association’s clubs in the competition. The current coefficient ranking is shown on the table below;

Italy is currently leading with 17.7 points, Germany in second with 16.4 points and England in third position with 16.2 points. With five England teams left in Europe this season in the quarter finals; Manchester City, Arsenal, Liverpool, West Ham and Aston Villa all progressing to the last eight of their various European competitions, Opta has predicted England to leapfrog Germany who has only three teams left to second place in the coefficient ranking.

According to Opta, Italy has a 96.9% chance of ranking first, England has 70.6% while Germany has only 29.1% even when currently ranked second.

I did mention earlier that it is possible for England to have up to seven teams in the UEFA Champions league next season. This can only happen if only the winners of both the Champions league and Europa League are both from England and finish outside the top five in the English Premier League. If this happens, four teams would qualify through making the top four, one team would qualify through coefficient ranking which would be the team that finishes fifth in the league, and finally the remaining two teams would book their places by winning the Champions League and Europa League.