The beauty of the third-tier Conference League is it enables team from smaller countries to compete in the group stages – and allow teams that don’t win many trophies to succeed.<\/p>\n
And Chelsea.<\/p>\n
Until the Blues steamrolled everyone last season to win the Conference League, the previous winners had been Roma, West Ham and Olympiakos.<\/p>\n
Roma ended a 14-year trophy drought, while it was 43 years for West Ham – and a Greek club had never won a European trophy before Olympiakos.<\/p>\n
So it is far from inconceivable that a team like Crystal Palace could lift it this time.<\/p>\n
The top seven countries in Uefa’s rankings only had one team each in it.<\/p>\n
They are Palace, Fiorentina, Rayo Vallecano, Mainz, Strasbourg, AZ Alkmaar – and Santa Clara, who lost to Shamrock Rovers so are out.<\/p>\n
And, having won the FA Cup in May, the Eagles actually have better recent pedigree than any of those other teams.<\/p>\n
Since 2002, of those teams, only Strasbourg (two French League Cups) and AZ (one Dutch title and one Dutch Cup) have won anything.<\/p>\n
Palace defender Chris Richards said: “Everybody is super excited. We are an ambitious club, and now is time to win some games in Europe. We are ready to make history.”<\/p>\n
Boss Glasner won the Europa League with Eintracht Frankfurt in 2021-22.<\/p>\n
Former Palace striker Glenn Murray, speaking on Channel 5, added: “Oliver Glasner has done it at the European level. To have him in charge, they have a special talent there.<\/p>\n
“I feel as though they will navigate it, and they will weigh the balance of the Premier League and Europe. Hopefully they can reach the later stages.”<\/p>\n
Ex-England defender Matt Upson, who had a brief loan spell at Palace in 2001, said: “They have shown they can navigate cup competitions. <\/p>\n
“They have a manager who is very pragmatic and knows how to get there, which gives them every chance.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The beauty of the third-tier Conference League is it enables team from smaller countries to compete in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":381111,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[79,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-381110","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-sports","9":"tag-uk","10":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115108860780149394","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=381110"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381110\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/381111"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=381110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=381110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=381110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}