A return to the top table? Newcastle United may have narrowly missed out on silverware in the Carabao Cup, but Eddie Howe can still exceed pre-season predictions enough to receive the LMA Manager of the Year award if they secure Champions League football.
That’s the opinion of bookmakers.tv, who have crunched the numbers to compare each Premier League team’s actual performance with how betting sites expected them to perform at the start of the season. All 20 sides were given a points handicap, with Manchester City and Liverpool predictably starting on just zero and four points respectively, while Bournemouth and Fulham were both handed a head start in excess of 50 points. (more…)
Dare we dream?European qualification is now looking very possible for Newcastle United, so what is involved in terms of games and what sort of pay-off can we expect from a decent run?
With European qualification looking ever more likely for Newcastle, it’s probably worth having a look at what qualification would mean to us in terms of the games we’d need to play.
The Europa league consists of 3 qualifying rounds, a play-off stage, 48-team a group stage, a round of 32, a round of 16, quarterfinals, semifinals and a final. Astonishingly, if a team from the first qualifying round gets to the final they’d have played 23 additional games in their season.
The first two qualifying rounds need not worry us though as the English League is ranked number 1 according to the UEFA coefficients and we can thus enter the competition at a higher stage. We have 3 places allocated to us for the Europa League. The most prestigious place goes to the FA Cup winners, who enter at the group stage. Then the 5th placed side in the Premier League enter at the play-off stage and the least prestigious place goes to the League Cup winners who enter in the third qualifying round. If a team qualifies more than once for a Europa League place they take the most prestigious slot they qualified for and the ‘reserve qualifier’ gets the less prestigious slot. (more…)
