The UEFA Europa Conference League is a planned annualfootball club competition, starting in 2021, by UEFA for eligible European football clubs. Clubs will qualify for the competition based on their performance in their national leagues and cup competitions. It will be the third tier of European club football, after the Champions League and the Europa League. The competition is scheduled to run from the 2021–22 season, and will serve as the bottom level of the existing UEFA Europa League competition, which is due to be reduced to 32 teams in the group stage. The competition will primarily be contested by teams from lower-ranked UEFA member associations. No teams will qualify directly, with 10 teams eliminated in the Europa League play-offs and the rest coming from the Europa Conference League qualifiers.
History
UEFA had reportedly considered adding a third-tier competition since at least 2015, believing that a bottom-level tournament could act as a means of giving clubs from lower-ranked UEFA member countries a chance of progressing to the later stages beyond the stages they usually are eliminated in the Champions League and Europa League. In mid-2018, talk of an announcement intensified, with news sources claiming an agreement had already been reached for the competition to be launched and that the 48-team Europa League group stage would be split in two, with the lower half forming the nucleus of what would be the new event. On 2 December 2018, UEFA announced that the competition – provisionally known as "Europa League 2" or just "UEL2" – was to be launched as part of the 2021–24 three-year competition cycle, with UEFA adding that the new tournament would bring "more matches for more clubs and more associations". The official name of the competition, "UEFA Europa Conference League", was announced on 24 September 2019.
Format
Qualification
Similar to the UEFA Champions League, qualification to the Europa Conference League will be split into two "paths" – the Champions Path and the League Path. Unlike the Champions League, however, the Champions Path will only be contested by teams which lost the qualification for the Champions League group stage and consequently have been relegated directly into the UECL. The association ranking based on the UEFA country coefficients is used to determine the number of participating teams in the league path for each association:
Nations ranked 1 through 5, will have one team;
Nations ranked 6 through 15, will have two teams;
Nations ranked 16 through 50, will have three teams;
Nations ranked 51 through 55, will have two teams;
Liechtenstein does not have a domestic league and will provide the winner of the Liechtenstein Football Cup irrespective of their coefficient ranking.
Based on this reorganisation, no association will benefit from more berths to continental football than they had before the 2021–24 competition cycle, with the tournament essentially being the lower orders of the existing Europa League tournament but split off into a secondary tournament.
The format will see eight groups of four teams, followed by the round of 16, quarter-finals, semi-finals and final. An additional preliminary knockout round will be played before the round of 16 between teams ranked second in their groups and the third-ranked teams of the UEFA Europa League groups. The new competition will feature 141 matches over 15 match weeks. The winner of the new competition will be entitled to participate in the UEFA Europa League in the following season. The new competition matches will be played on Thursdays.
Distribution (from 2021–22 to 2023–24)
All qualification berths are based on UEFA's default assumption that each association will submit one domestic cup winner as its highest-ranked qualifier after those eligible to enter the Champions League, and will define its remaining entrants by their league position in the previous year. England allocates its lowest-ranked qualification place to the winners of the EFL Cup.
