UEFA Play-Off Round Draw Complete
Overall good news for Scottish teams, but harsh on Motherwell
The play-off draw was completed for all three UEFA men’s competitions this morning and, overall, it gave Scottish sides a favourable set of routes towards the league phase and the coefficient points that come with it.
The national coefficient is now so low that it will take at least two or three years of consistently strong results before Scotland can meaningfully improve its position. Even getting back to this summer’s entry points will require several clubs to reach, and then properly compete in, the league phases year after year. There is more detail on the coefficient picture in last week’s weekly review.
Before today’s draw, I raised the concern that - for the first time since it was introduced - UEFA did not evenly distribute the top sides in the pre-draw groupings.
The top five leagues normally enter one side in the Conference League play-off round, unless their domestic allocation is affected by a European title-holder place. That happened in 2021/22, when Spain had no Conference League entrant after Villarreal won the Europa League and entered the Champions League as title holders.
In each of the previous five seasons, UEFA had evenly spread those four or five clubs across the four pre-draw groups, giving seeded teams a broadly equal chance of drawing one of the tournament favourites.
This year, though, UEFA placed two top-league sides in Group 1 and two in Group 2, with none in Groups 3 or 4. The fifth side from the top five leagues, Getafe, were unseeded in Group 4, so they could not be paired with another team from the top four leagues….
So, when Hearts, Hibs and Motherwell were all put in the first two groups, we had fairly high odds of seeing Scottish teams being paired with some of the tournament favourites.
As it was, only Motherwell were handed that unfortunate slice of luck, drawing last year’s Europa League finalists Freiburg. The rest of Scotland’s Conference League sides got away with it and can be fairly happy with the draw, given the other options.
This article will now show the latest “route to the league phase” graphic, mapping out each team’s path through qualifiers, before a brief summation of the opponents.
The Route to the League Phase
The play-off picture is now clear enough to judge the routes properly, and the Scottish teams had an overall positive outcome.
Celtic and Rangers will both feel they have been handed winnable ties, Hibs have avoided the worst of a brutal pre-draw grouping, Hearts obviously face a huge Europa League test before likely needing the more forgiving fallback in the Conference, and Motherwell have landed the hardest play-off tie of the lot.
