This is the point in a football season when bad news gets confirmed.

Usually that has been relegation or mathematical failure to reach the play-offs, or perhaps a favourite player not being on your club’s retained list.

This season there has been an exciting new entry to the scene: the confident-then-agonising wait to see if the Premier League would claim a fifth spot in the 2024-25 Champions League.



This is the Premier League, after all.

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Last season, Manchester City won the Champions League, West Ham United won the Europa Conference League and all four Premier League representatives in the Champions League made it past Christmas and into the knockout stages.

Who can the team who finish in fifth place — Tottenham, probably — point their fingers at when they are handed a mildly-enticing Europa League spot in 2024-25 instead of a shiny ticket to the Champions League?

Maybe… everyone?

Maybe Newcastle and Manchester United should have avoided finishing bottom of their groups (the first time two Premier League sides have done this in the same season) in the autumn.

Although Eddie Howe will surely point the two qualifiers from Newcastle’s group — Paris Saint-Germain and Borussia Dortmund — contesting one of the semi-finals.

Maybe Brighton should have done better under the historic lights of the Stadio Olimpico in early March, although that was an understandably daunting task in the club’s first-ever European adventure.

Maybe Liverpool should have attempted some form of defending in their home tie against Atalanta last month: that 3-0 defeat at Anfield all but condemned the Europa League favourites to an early exit.

Maybe Arsenal could have stayed a bit calmer when they were on top and in the lead against Bayern at the Emirates.

Maybe Tottenham shouldn’t have sold Harry Kane to Bayern — no player has scored more than the Englishman’s eight goals in the Champions League this season and he still has a reasonable chance of guiding his new employers to a potentially all-German final at Wembley next month.

Maybe Jude Bellingham shouldn’t have joined Real Madrid and helped them knock out holders Manchester City in the quarter-finals.

Maybe West Ham could have done what no other side has done this season and found a way to defeat Bayer Leverkusen, almost certainly the best Bundesliga team in one of that league’s strongest-ever seasons.

In reality this was death by a thousand cuts for the Premier League.

2023-24 will be only the second season in the last nine that won’t feature at least one Premier League side in a European final, and that’s assuming Aston Villa don’t overturn their two-goal deficit against Olympiakos next week.

And Villa will probably be the one side who do benefit continentally from this season, even if they do exit the Conference League in the semi-finals.

Five Champions League spots was always going to open qualification up to new sides, and Villa, who haven’t played in Europe’s premier competition since 1982-83, now look likely to get an opportunity to do so next season.

Maybe four Champions League places was plenty after all.


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