Hey, you might have heard this, but Tottenham Hotspur are going to be playing Champions League football next season. Why, you ask? Because despite finishing 17th in the Premier League, Spurs won the gol-danged Europa League thereby qualifying for the competition!
Let’s just reiterate that again, because it never gets old: Tottenham Hotspur are Europa League Champions!! Yeah. Still feels pretty great, doesn’t it?
Champions League qualification still isn’t finished as there are still about 7 slots up for grabs that will be resolved through a qualification playoff process. That said, Football Rankings have given their projections for the pots for next year’s competition, and according to their projections Spurs will be in Pot 3.
So when I first saw this, I’m so CL Draw-pilled that my first inclination was to get mad. Whaddya mean Pot 3? We’re gonna get screwed in the draw! But then I remembered the format change to the Swiss Model — no matter what pot Spurs end up in, they’ll still be drawn against two teams from each pot, so the pots really don’t matter all that much. You could get tough home/away draws against difficult opponents from every pot, but there aren’t any “groups of death” anymore. I kind of like it.
That said, we can glean a little info from the pots. For example, we know we’ll be drawn against two of Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, PSG, Inter Milan, Dortmund, or Barcelona from Pot 1, because the rest of the Pot 1 clubs are Premier League, and we can’t be drawn against teams from our own federation.
Second, while the names without a check mark are unconfirmed, there are some very familiar names in those pots. Bodø/Glimt, Frankfurt, Slavia Praha, Galatasaray, Olympiacos, Athletic Bilbao, and Ferencvaros were all in the Europa League last season, and Spurs finished higher than all of them. (And hey, weren’t we just told a couple of weeks ago that playing clubs like Bodø/Glimt and Frankfurt devalued the importance of the Europa League competition? Big Thinky Emoji goes here.)
The level of competition is obviously higher in the Champions League, but Spurs are pretty much guaranteed a mix of teams substantially better than them as well as substantially worse. There’s the whole luck of the draw, of course, but looking at those pots I can see Spurs potentially being at least competitive. Maybe they won’t be top eight like they were this season, but perhaps the playoffs?