Champions and Europa League Qualifiers Kick Off

The champagne has barely stopped flowing from Real Madrid’s victory but the 2018/19 Champions League qualifiers have already started with the Europa League close behind.

Even though it’s only July the club sides of giants like San Marino, Malta and the Faroe Islands among others are about to come out to play and start their quest for the group stages. Yes the actual football may be terrible but we won’t have to sit through it. No TV channel will go near most of these ties and for a little while at least we still have the World Cup to enjoy.

UEFA Club coefficient and country coefficient

The excitement will come from the betting opportunities, not the matches themselves. Even the most thorough football trader at the biggest bookmaker is simply not going to be able to tell you with any certainty that the Armenian champions would beat the Estonian champions. Neither will they be able to say that the league in San Marino is better or worse than the Andorran one. It’s sometimes simply guesswork on the part of the bookies but we can use the UEFA club coefficient and country coefficients to help.

Football traders worth their salt will be concentrating on balancing their World Cup books, not wondering who will take the penalties for the Kosovan qualifiers. The prices offered can be arbitrary so if the rankings and the odds seem at, well odds, then we could be on to a sound investment.

Summer Leagues have the advantage

What also needs to be taken into account is the state of play of the league in each country – do they roughly follow most of Europe in an August / September start or like Finland and Sweden do they play through the summer? A team in mid-season will have a big advantage over a team in pre-season.

When the bigger leagues get involved some of them will only just be back in training and even then their best players could have been at the World Cup and granted an extended summer break. A fully match-fit team will always have a chance against a reserve side just back from the beach – see West Ham below.

Fairweather friends

Lastly we need to look at environmental factors and we’re pretty sure the shock to the system that a team suffers when they play in the blazing heat and humidity of Malta in the summer is not something many will take into account. West Ham had that exact pleasure a couple of years ago, losing 1-0 to Birkirkara and just scraping through on penalties in the end. Celtic also came unstuck to Lincoln Red Imps of Gibraltar recently, losing 1-0.

We can also take into account the travel involved. A lot of the teams at this stage come from places even Ryanair don’t have the cheek to offer flights to. Away teams can be looking at long and difficult journeys in hot conditions, a world away from trips to Milan or Madrid in the competition proper. When they do arrive they can end up playing in rickety stadia on rough pitches, proper equalisers that can make even the smallest team a potential banana skin.