The Europa Conference Corner

Wikipedia defines the Europa Conference League as ‘an annual football club competition organised by the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA)’, which ‘will serve as the bottom level of the existing UEFA Europa League competition, which was reduced from 48 to 32 teams in the group stage’. So far so procedural. However, the key to the Conference League is the following detail, almost an afterthought: the Conference League ‘will primarily be contested by teams from lower-ranked UEFA member associations‘.

There are no clashes between superclubs here, no drearily predictable knockout draws. There were four clubs from east of Berlin in the thirty-two that comprise the 2022-23 Champions League groups. There are eighteen in the thirty-two that make up the 2022-23 Conference League groups. The Conference League pays scant attention to the ‘Big Five’ leagues, which in 2021-22 contribute only five teams across four of eight groups – compared with nineteen teams, across every group, in the 2021-22 Champions League.

The Conference League brings European competition to places that have rarely, or never, been included before – in 2021-22 Armenia, Estonia and Gibraltar had their very first taste of European group stage football. 2022-23 has extended that honour to Kosovar, Liechtensteiner and Lithuanian sides, with fresh European debutants from Denmark, Sweden, Czechia, Armenia and Latvia to boot. The Conference League is weird and wonderful and varies wildly in quality, and we hope you’ll find some stories which pique your interest here in Conference Corner.