Favorable Draw for German Clubs in Europe

On Fri­day UEFA con­ducted the draws for the Cham­pi­ons League and Europa League play-off rounds.  In the Cham­pi­ons League, Vfb Stuttgart will be matched against FC Timisoara of Romania’s Liga 1.  Timisoara fin­ished as runners-up in last year’s Roman­ian Cham­pi­onship, and boast the likes of Costa Rican inter­na­tional striker Win­ston Parks.  Hav­ing suc­cess­fully avoided the more dif­fi­cult draws of Fiorentina or Ath­letico Madrid, how­ever, Die Schwaben will cer­tainly be the favorites to progress to the Cham­pi­ons League Group Stage, where they will join fel­low Bun­desliga title-challengers Wolfs­burg and Bay­ern Munich.

The Third Qual­i­fy­ing Round for the Inau­gural UEFA Europa League Cam­paign saw last year’s beaten DFB Pokal and UEFA Cup Semi-Finalists Ham­burg progress eas­ily against Dan­ish side Ran­ders FC with a score of 4–1 on aggre­gate. In the Play-off Round Die Rotho­sen have been drawn against French team EA Guingamp , and are cer­tainly the favorites to progress. They will be joined in the next round by fel­low Bun­desliga sides Hertha Berlin and Werder Bre­men, last year’s UEFA-Cup Runners-Up and DFB Pokal winners.

Hertha Berlin have been tasked with over­com­ing Denmark’s Brøndby IF en route to reach­ing the Europa League Group stages. While Brøndby IF should not be taken lightly, again, Die Alte Dame is the odds-on favorite to secure a spot in the Group Stage.

Werder Bre­men, mean­while, begin their quest to return to a Euro­pean final against FK Aktobe of Kaza­khstan, the low­est seeded team left stand­ing in an UEFA Com­pe­ti­tion this sea­son (0.649). Werder Bre­men, cur­rently the high­est seeded team tak­ing part in the Europa League (91.339) are astro­nom­i­cal favorites to progress. Should FK Aktobe, the reign­ing Kazak Cham­pi­ons, get a result against Werder Bre­men, it would cer­tainly be the great­est upset in Euro­pean Club foot­ball in quite a long time.

The Group Stages of Euro­pean Club Foot­ball are nearly upon us, and all four Bun­desliga sides are favorites to progress. As if the chal­lenge of rep­re­sent­ing the Bun­desliga on the Euro­pean Stage was not enough for these clubs (along with the Ger­man Clubs enter­ing in the Group Stage), this season’s Cham­pi­ons and Europa Leagues pro­vides an addi­tion oppor­tu­nity, one that could greatly deter­mine the race at the top of the Bun­desliga table this season.

Should Ger­man clubs per­form bet­ter than then their Ital­ian coun­ter­parts this sea­son on the Euro­pean Stage, Ger­many will in all like­li­hood pass Italy for the third spot in the UEFA Coun­try Coef­fi­cients. This of course means that next sea­son it is pos­si­ble to have four Ger­man teams qual­ify for the Cham­pi­ons League. With the Bun­desliga title race, and as a result, the race for the Cham­pi­ons League spots look­ing tighter than ever this sea­son, these matches in Europe have attained a new level of importance.

What makes this sit­u­a­tion inter­est­ing is that all the Ger­man Clubs con­test­ing Euro­pean Com­pe­ti­tions this sea­son are also favorites to qual­ify for Euro­pean Com­pe­ti­tion again through their league stand­ing. The oppor­tu­nity to boost the num­ber of Cham­pi­ons League spots for next sea­son means that clubs will be much less likely to sac­ri­fice their league cam­paign in the lat­ter half of the sea­son for the sake of pro­gress­ing fur­ther in the Europa League or Cham­pi­ons League, as a good per­for­mance in the lat­ter will make their league cam­paign all the more valuable.

But let’s not get ahead of our­selves; we have a long sea­son of Euro­pean Club Com­pe­ti­tion ahead of us. Hope­fully the com­pet­i­tive nature of the Bun­desliga will pre­pare its clubs for the chal­lenge of win­ning sil­ver­ware in Europe.

Tagged as: Cham, Europa League, Europe, Hamburger SV, Hertha BSC Berlin, VfB Stuttgart, Werder Bremen