Premier League Play-offs.

I see that The Guardian newspaper ran a story on Sunday 14^th Feb stating that the Premier league is considering introducing a play-off system for the fourth Champions League qualifying spot. The play-offs would be between the teams who finished 4^th, 5^th, 6^th & 7^th in the league. The current format is the at the end of a season the top 2 teams automatically qualify for the champions league whilst 3^rd & 4^th place have to play a 2-leg qualification game against teams from other countries.  The full article can be found here in The Guardian 

I have mixed feelings about this proposal.  As a Liverpool FC fan, I don’t want my team to risk its place in Europe’s elite club competition, especially since we have finished in fourth spot a few times over the last 5-6 seasons. Plus I believe that if a team is good enough to play in the Champions League then they should be good enough to finish in the top 4 of the premier league.

If they do implement the play-off system, why do it for fourth spot only? They should also include the third spot, since the teams finishing in 3^rd has also to go into a play-off to qualify for the Champions League group stage.

The Guardian pointed out that if a vote is taken the premier league needs a 14-6 majority in favour to introduce such a measure, so is this play-off system inevitable?   Well let’s look at it like this, the four qualification spots have gone to the same 4 teams for the majority of the last 8 seasons, so the 4 teams will obviously vote against the proposal, while the other 16 teams in the premier league will vote in favour of the play-offs. So yes it would seem inevitable.