The inglorious elimination of Club Brugge on the field of Benfica (obviously) did not yield any points for the Belgian coefficient, but Anderlecht, Union and AA Gent all grabbed 0.200 points for their draw. With our 12,000 points in the current season, we are the best performing football nation this season outside the traditional top five of England, Germany, Spain, Italy and France.
Portugal is currently seventh in the 2022/2023 ranking thanks to Benfica’s 5-1 win against Club Brugge in the Champions League and Sporting’s 2-2 draw against Arsenal in the Europa League. (Porto will only play in the Champions League next week). The Netherlands is also having a good season thanks to AZ Alkmaar, which already won 1-2 against Lazio Roma in the Conference League on Tuesday, and Feyenoord, which drew 1-1 on a visit to Shakhtar Donetsk in the Europa League.
Our northern neighbors also did a great job because AZ Lazio surprised Roma. — © ISOPIX
Turkey, which is also experiencing one of its best European seasons ever, did not have the best evening. Fenerbahçe lost 2-0 to Sevilla in the Europa League, Sivasspor lost 1-0 to Fiorentina in the Conference League. Only Basaksehir was able to score points through their 1-1 draw at AA Gent in the Conference League.
That is not very strange at this stage of the competition, and also the reason why not losing three times (and therefore taking points) is not bad for our teams. After all, of the twenty European eighth finals played this week, the winner was only three times a club that did not come from a top five country. You already saw two of those three above (Benfica and AZ), the third is the Polish Lech Poznan, who beat the Swedish Djurgårdens.
European quarter final Union would give our country record
A lot is at stake for our country next Thursday: thanks to the draws of Anderlecht, Union and AA Gent, all three still have the prospect of a prestigious European quarter final. That means that next week we could just break our coefficient record. Then on paper this is our best European season ever since the introduction of the coefficient in 1979. At the moment that is still the 2016/2017 season, where we collected 12,500 points.
© BELGIUM
A win (0.400 points) and a draw (0.200 points) should be enough next week to grab the most points ever from the European stage. If that one victory comes from Union, that will even suffice. After all, for the people of Brussels, a home win against Union Berlin would mean that they qualify for the quarter-finals of the Europa League, and the European football association UEFA awards an additional bonus of 0.200 coefficient points for this.
We are now very firmly eighth in the five-year coefficient ranking, which the European football association UEFA uses to allocate its European tickets. All the points we collect at the moment are bonuses because our first pursuers Scotland, Austria and Serbia already saw all their European participants eliminated and cannot take any more points. At the end of last season, our country had fallen out of the top ten, so that Belgium will no longer have a direct participant in the Champions League next season. Thanks to the strong performances in the current season, we are already certain that we will regain that privilege in 2024.
Top ten coefficient ranking 2018-2023:
1. England 105,141
2. Spain 90,141
3. Germany 81,356
4. Italy 75,497
5. France 60,664
6. The Netherlands 57,900
7. Portugal 55.382
8. Belgium 40,000
9. Scotland 36,400
10. Austria 34,000
Top Ten Coefficient Ranking 2022/2023:
1. England 18,571
2. Germany 16,000
3. Italy 15,928
4. Spain 13,714
5. France 12,083
6. Belgium 12,000
7. Portugal 11.666
8. The Netherlands 11,500
9. Turkey 11,400
10. Poland 6,750
