This season’s Scottish Premiership runners-up will still enter the Champions League in the second qualifying round. <\/p>\n
If they win their first qualifier they are guaranteed Europa League football at minimum.<\/p>\n
This will change as of 2026-27.<\/p>\n
Second place will by right only earn a spot in the second qualifying round of the Conference League. <\/p>\n
The Scottish Cup carries a place in the Europa League, which would pass to the runners-up if the winners finished in the top two.<\/p>\n
But that is going be in the first qualifying round in mid-July, two rounds earlier than this season and four ties from the league phase.<\/p>\n
It will become harder for the champions, too.<\/p>\n
Presently, they join in the play-off round and only need to win one tie to make the Champions League. Lose it and they are guaranteed a spot in the Europa League.<\/p>\n
Next season’s champions are set to enter in the second qualifying round in 2027-28, meaning they must win three ties to reach the league phase. <\/p>\n
There is no automatic Europa League safety net, either.<\/p>\n
It will be possible for the champions to lose in consecutive qualifying rounds of all three competitions. <\/p>\n
That would be in the second round of the Champions League, third round of the Europa League and then the play-off round of the Conference League.<\/p>\n
The champions could miss out on league-phase football altogether.<\/p>\n
Cyprus and Denmark are set to be the beneficiaries, with their coefficient boosted this season by their best ever European campaigns.<\/p>\n
They will receive two places in the Champions League instead, with Austria the other country to fall out of the top 15.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This season’s Scottish Premiership runners-up will still enter the Champions League in the second qualifying round. If they…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":492894,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,596,85],"class_list":["post-492893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-football","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=492893"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492893\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/492894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=492893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=492893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=492893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}