Legia Warsaw and Jagiellonia Białystok – these two teams will represent Poland in European cups in the fall. Both will play in the league phase of the Conference League, which became clear after Thursday's qualifying matches. And in them, Polish clubs did quite well.
Legia Warsaw and Wisła Kraków's victories in Europe gave valuable ranking points
In addition to Legia and Jagiellonia, Wisła Kraków also played. The Polish champions performed the worst, failing to match Ajax in Amsterdam and losing 0:3 (and the entire two-legged tie 1:7). This meant goodbye to the Europa League and “relegation” to the Conference League.
In the latter competition, Legia and Wisła competed. The former exhausted their 1-0 victory over Drita (they won the entire two-legged tie 3-0), while the latter sensationally defeated Cercle Brugge 4-1 and were just a short of making up for the losses from the first match (they lost the two-legged tie 5-7). These two results were very important in the context of the UEFA national ranking.
Legia and Wisła's wins added 0.250 points to the list, or 0.500 points in total. This means that Poland's total since the beginning of the season is 3.375 points – compared to the countries occupying the neighboring places, this is a great result. However, taking into account only this week, many rivals have achieved better results – mainly those who received a bonus for their representatives' promotion to the league phase of the Champions League (there are no such bonuses for promotion to the LE and LKE).
Selected countries' performance in UEFA country rankings for this week
- Austria – 2,600 points
- Croatia – 1,750 points
- Switzerland – 1,700 points
- Serbia – 1,400 points
- Ukraine, Scotland – 1,300 points
- PolandGreece – 0.500 points
- Israel – 0.250 points
- Denmark – 0.125 points
Despite this, Poland remains in 18th place in the national ranking. The goal for this season is to fight for 15th position, which allows them to field two teams in the Champions League qualifiers (and five in the cups in general). However, it is clear that this will be difficult, because the gap to other countries is not small, and they also have at least two representatives in Europe (the exceptions in the second ten of the ranking are Israel and Croatia). Legia and Jagiellonia would therefore have to achieve very good results, and their rivals would have to suffer many failures.
UEFA National Rankings – as of August 30
- 1. England – 89,303 points (7/7 clubs still playing in European cups)
- 2. Italy – 79,231 (8/8)
- 3. Spain – 74,275 points (7/7)
- 4. Germany – 71,910 points (8/8)
- 5. France – 59,093 points (6/7)
- …
- 11. Norway – 31,500 points (2/4)
- 12. Austria – 31,000 points (4/5)
- 13. Israel – 30,625 points (1/4)
- 14. Switzerland – 29,975 points (3/5)
- 15. Greece – 29,500 points (3/4)
- 16. Denmark – 29,325 points (2/4)
- 17. Scotland – 28,500 points (3/5)
- 18. Poland – 26,625 points (2/4)
- 19. Croatia – 25,025 points (1/4)
- 20. Serbia – 23,675 points (2/5)
- 21. Ukraine – 22,800 points (2/5)
Much will depend on who Legia and Jagiellonia will face in the LK league phase. We will find out on Friday, the league phase draw will begin at 2:30 p.m. The text coverage will be available on Sport.pl and in the Sport.pl LIVE mobile application.