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The battle to make (or avoid) the Europa League may come down to bookings

By on May 11, 2015
Football holds all different kinds of meaning for different people.  For some it may be an outlet of relief, for others a source of pride.  It can be a means of life or simply casual pleasure.  But every football player has one simple objective on the pitch: to win or at the very least go down fighting.  Every man or woman giving it their all for the cause: aggression channeled into beauty.

And then there are the occasional outliers.  In an infamous 1994 Caribbean Cup match between Barbados and Greneda, each team — first Barbados, needing to score two to advance, then Grenada, found scoring own goals in their best interests to force and prevent, respectively, the game from going into extra-time, in which the organizers decided to make every goal count double.  It shockingly worked for Barbados.  Similar scenes played out in the 1998 Tiger Cup game between Indonesia and Thailand.

These oddities are rarer on the big stage, however, as the rules are put under more intensive scrutiny to avoid such situations.

Yet West Ham United’s match against Everton this weekend has the potential to form one of them, albeit for more perverse reasons.  At the beginning of the season, Everton were actually expected to challenge for a Europa League spot, spearheaded by Roberto Martinez and their record signing Romelu Lukaku.  Yet their form never fully got going, and the club are languishing mid-table, on track for their worst finish in over a decade.  West Ham excited around Christmas and climbed the table as far as the top four, but their form tailed off as well; now, they sit only one place and three points above Everton. And while the Toffees could still quite easily overtake West Ham, the battle this weekend is likely not to have anything directly to do with the league table at all.

UEFA annually award an extra Europa League qualification berth to three leagues as part of their fair play campaign — the three spots are given to the leagues with the three highest fair play rankings.  Measured by a points system (ten for a game with no cards, with one subtracted for each yellow and three for each red), the English Premier League, Dutch Eredivisie, and the Irish Premier League topped the 2015 table.  Each league then rewards their spot to the best team not already qualified for Europe in their respective fair play tables, so long as they have an average score above 8.0.

Oddly, West Ham and Everton are currently second and third, respectively, in the Premier League’s Fair Play table.  Liverpool sit first, but are already surefire candidates to qualify directly for the Europa League.  Thus, for West Ham and Everton, their seasons’ success may be defined by who can keep the best behavior on the pitch, much less than results given they’re both comfortably mid-table.

Before the past weekend, West Ham sat marginally above Everton in the Fair Play table, but that could easily change now with two matches still to go.  We could come across a situation where both sides sit back, take it easy, and simply avoid bookings, no matter the score of the game.  West Ham play relegation-battling Newcastle, offering Newcastle a chance to secure a vital three points.  More interestingly, West Ham’s meeting with Everton could become a very boring fixture of the match-fixed like. 

Or even more ironically, Sam Allardyce and Martinez might very well not fancy Thursday nights in the Europa League next season, in which case, perhaps they’ll engage in a full-on, bloody battle for who can earn the most cards.  Football, bloody hell.

Photo credit: Stiendy on Flickr


About Alex Morgan

Alex Morgan, founder of Football Every Day, lives and breaths football from the West Coast of the United States in California. Aside from founding Football Every Day in January of 2013, Alex has also launched his own journalism career and hopes to help others do the same with FBED. He covers the San Jose Earthquakes as a beat reporter for QuakesTalk.com and his work has also been featured in the BBC's Match of the Day Magazine.