The Scottish Premiership will no longer have an automatic Champions League group stage place from next season after being leapfrogged by the Czech Republic in the coefficient rankings.
Thanks to some strong performances, the champions of the top flight have been guaranteed a place in the past three seasons.
While Celtic or Rangers will still have that prize on offer for securing this season's title, a result in the Europa Conference League quarter-finals has seen that taken away starting from the next campaign.
Viktoria Plzen kept their seventh consecutive clean sheet in the competition to draw 0-0 with Fiorentina, meaning that the Czech Republic has climbed above Scotland into 10th place.
Teams are awarded two points for a win and one for a draw, with the country coefficient calculated on the cumulative performance of the teams it entered into European competition at the start of the season.
The ranking is done on a five-year average.
With all Scottish teams already eliminated, Plzen had to lose both legs of their tie for the Premiership to retain its spot for next season and guarantee entry for the league winners to the 2025-26 Champions League.
However, the draw gives 0.25 to the Czech Republic - Plzen's point divided by the four teams, Sparta Prague, Slavia Prague and Bohemians being the others - who entered European competition and pushes Scotland down to 11th.
That could still see Rangers qualify automatically next season if they take the title, as long as they are league champion with the highest individual coefficient score in the qualifying rounds, and the Champions League winners have already qualified via their own domestic league.
Going forward though the Premiership faces a real battle not to fall even further down the rankings.
The 2019-20 season saw the Premiership accrue 9.75 points, largely thanks to Rangers reaching the last 16 of the Europa League and Celtic the last 32.
Thanks to the five-year average that will drop off the calculations from next season, automatically pushing the Scottish coefficient down to 16th place to start the campaign.
The five clubs which enter will have to perform well to maintain or move up the ranking, with the 8.5 points from 2021-22 and the 7.9 built largely by Rangers' run to the Europa League final to be removed from the five-year average in the subsequent campaigns.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereLast Updated:
Report this comment Cancel