European Qualification Chances 2026-04-07
How hard can it be to answer the question: How likely are Fulham to qualify for Europe for 2027?
The answer was very.
I believe at this point the Premier League are 99+% to get a 5th Champions League spot and champions league qualification is simple: either finish top 5 or win the Champions League or Europa League. Europa League and Conference League are remarkably confusing.
The default logic is that the Premier League is given two Europa League spots, one given to the FA Cup winner, the other to 6th place in the Premier League. The Premier League is also given a singular Europa Conference League spot, defaulting to the winner of the League Cup.
It gets confusing when the cup winners start qualifying for UCL or UEL outright. There are too many interdependencies that you can’t easily mesh the probabilities of each league finish and cup competitions together.
I wrote a basic Monte Carlo simulation for each cup winner; I cheated and took the probabilities from bookmakers factoring in implied spread. This is a far better approximation that stealing it from Opta or trying to build my own cup sims. However I needed to tie that to my Premier League standing sims, so I rewrote that code and now every individual season I simulate gives me the cup winners and the final prem standing. This was far more involved than I’d anticipated but gave me the impetus to vectorise some of the horrible loops I’d been using and means I can run 100,000 sims in less time I could only run 25,000 previously.
After a horrific number of failed attempts I’ve programmed in the cascading logic from the official rules but there’s still some edge cases missing. For example: what happens if Aston Villa come 6th but win the Europa League? Obviously Aston Villa qualify for the Champions League, but what happens to that 6th place Europa League spot? There actually isn’t guidance for this from either UEFA or the Premier League.
Anyway below is my best attempts to give each team’s potential to qualify for 2027 European competitions. I’ll update this after each Premier League round and after each round of European fixtures concludes.
