This may have escaped you, but no team is qualified directly for the Conference League, the third UEFA competition. The 36 participants will all come from the dams, scheduled for Thursdays, August 21 and 28. And unlike the Champions League and the Europa League, the teams will have six different opponents (and not eight), from October 2 to December 18, in order to define the classification of this first phase.
The RC Strasbourg, which concluded its beautiful 2024-2025 season in a 7th place in Ligue 1, hopes to play the conference unlike the RC Lens, eliminated last year by Panathinaikos (2-3 in the cumulative). Launched in 2021, the Europa League Conference had seen the Stade Rennais release Rosenborg (5-1 in the cumulative) in play-offs, then the OGC Nice beat the Maccabi Tel Aviv (1-2 cumulative) and the LOSC survive the Croats of Rijeka (3-2 in cumulative).
The Alsatians will be fixed from the draw on Monday noon! The RCSA has no UEFA point and, as the regulations provide in this case, takes up the minimum coefficient of France, which allows it to be part of the heads of the heads of standard. What to avoid the beautiful teams present in dams, in particular the representatives of the Premier League, the Liga, the Bundesliga and the Serie A, which are respectively Crystal Palace, the Rayo Vallecano, Mainz and the Fiorentina. We could also find Alkmaar, Sparta Prague, Anderlecht, Braga, Panathinaikos, Shakhtar and Besiktas, who will all compete in their 3rd qualifying round in the coming days.
Strasbourg against 5th in Portugal?
Liam Rosenior and his players hope to avoid the few big pieces of the second hat, for example Santa Clara, 5th in the last Portuguese championship, Hajduk Split, 3rd in Croatia, or Aek Athens, 4th in Greece. Astana FK (Kazakhstan) and Sabah FC (Azerbaijan) would offer a very distant trip, even if these two teams have not yet played their double confrontation of the third round.
Note the presence of Györ, Hungarian club which had humiliated Montpellier in qualifying for the Europa League 2010-2011. Finally, Crystal Palace, winner of the FA Cup, is the English representative in the running in this competition but the London training, relegated from the C3 to the C4 due to the presence of OL in the Europa League, appealed. The heap has been seized. Nottingham Forest would then resume his place at a conference.
