Chart Soccer – How I rate teams in European Competitions

I have had a few questions about how I organise my Chart Soccer competitions, so I have decided I will do some posts to explain how I do things, in the hope that others may find this interesting and useful. First, as I have been asked about this quite a lot lately, I will explain how I do my European club competitions.

So, it’s all done in a spreadsheet (of course) and in this spreadsheet I start off with a “paste sheet”, which is where I paste the raw data that will be used on the other tabs. This means that I can pull the data off of that sheet without changing it in any way. (This sheet is called “Rankings” in my spreadsheet.)

Firstly, I grab the country rankings from Bert Kassies’ excellent web site at https://kassiesa.net/uefa/. I usually use the latest data, but as I often do more than one season every year, sometimes I go back into previous years’ data.

The important pages are the “Country Coef”, “Country Ranking” and “Club Ranking” pages. These have lists of countries by coefficient, clubs by coefficient, and the points gained by each club in each country in Europe that season. The latter is a good way of choosing your teams for your own competitions as you can pick a selection from each country – see the screenshot below.

I grab the data from the “Country Rankings” and “Club Rankings” pages, and paste them into the paste sheet.

Next I have a “Qualification” sheet. On this sheet I rank the countries according to their coefficients and allocate places in each competition based on those positions. I only allocate to the top 32 countries, to keep it manageable, although I do tweak some of the lower countries so as to include the likes of Wales and Northern Ireland, for example.

In the screenshots above, the key shows the qualification for the Champions’ League (Euro-League). For the Euro-Cup (equivalent to the Europa League but knockout only), each of the 32 countries gets two qualifiers.

Next, I have a “Ratings” sheet. This just grabs the teams I have entered onto the “Qualification” sheet and their coefficient from the “Rankings” sheet, and then sorts them into order of merit, and suitable ratings applied, usually on a scale from 1 to 8.

I can then use these rankings to do the draws, as many of these are seeded to keep the top teams apart in the earlier rounds. In the screenshot below, you can see the seedings and draw for the Preliminary Round of the Euro-League. This involves the teams highlighted in pink on the “Qualification” sheet, and as you can see I keep this colour-coding all the way through.

After each round a new seedings list is created from the winners of the previous round and any new teams joining the competition at this stage.

These seedings are applied at most stages of both competitions, apart from the knockout stages of the Euro-League. In the last 16 of the Euro-League, the teams are seeded as group winners against group runners-up, with the proviso that:

  1. Teams that qualified from the same group cannot play each other;
  2. Teams from the same country cannot play each other;
  3. The group winners are always the home team in the second leg.

From the quarter-finals onwards in the Euro-League there are no seedings and it is an open draw.

Hopefully this is of some help to those interested in how I do this. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask in the comments.

Alex

13 thoughts on “Chart Soccer – How I rate teams in European Competitions”

  1. Hi Alex
    Just to say it looks like a tremendous amount of thought and work has gone into developing the process for the European competition’s side of things. Kudos to you and love the layout of the actual fixtures!

  2. Hi Alex

    You’ve obviously put in a tremendous amount of thought and work into the process for your European competitions. Kudos to you and love the layout for the fixtures. Thanks for sharing.

    1. Thanks very much. It started off as just a simple spreadsheet and has slowly been tweaked and formed into what it is now, with tweaking and adding colour etc

    1. I use normal dice, i.e. mu,bered from 1 to 6 with dots, and convert the scores to LOGacta equivalents depending on the ratings of the clubs involved.

  3. Hi Alex,
    Very interested in what you’ve done with the European rankings, coefficients etc. Is this included within the spreadsheet you have available on ebay?

    1. Hi Dave

      No, the spreadsheet just has generic templates that you can use for European and domestic knockout cups. You enter names of teams of your own choice, and rank and rate them as you wish. I just use the Bert Kassies data to help me with that.

      The rankings mentioned in the post are done for my own competitions that I play myself, so aren’t appropriate for the ones in the spreadsheet. Also, the data is just copied and pasted from the site, so you can get more from there than anything I could provide.

      Alex

      1. Hi Alex
        Many thanks for clarifying. I have a similar project ongoing, although not using Logacta. I’ll keep following yours with interest.
        Dave

  4. Hi Alex,

    Hope you are keeping safe and sane!

    After tackling the FA Cup from the very first prelim round I thought I would have a go at doing my own version of the Champions League and Europa League, Called the Pinnacle Champions League and Pinnacle Europa League (Yes I know, very original, lol). Thanks to this blog I have discovered Bert Kassies site which is where I am pulling my data from along with wikipedia for the structures of each competition. Thanks for that.

    I have also listed the main leagues from each member association and randomly chosen teams from each country for each competition, which I thought would be a good idea but obviously because it is random an awful lot of teams don’t appear on the club ranking, so i had to spend hours inserting them in. Not that I am complaining. keeps the grey cells working.

    I am also thinking which is probably daft to start using my own points system from each season I play so then I get my own club rankings based on the competitions I play. Have you thought about doing this? or do you use the uefa coeffiecients in all of yours? It sounds like a good idea, but who knows.

    Anyway just want to thank you for all your help so far and POWER to the spreadsheet!

    Regards

    Mark

    1. Hi Mark

      Sounds like an interesting project. Yes, I have also thought about using the performances of the teams in my competitions to keep running performance coefficients, and in fact I used to do that back in the day, but it was when the competitions were much less complex than now and also the real data wasn’t readily available. Nowadays I just use the actual coefficients, but it’s something that I’ve thought about and if I could work out how best to do it I probably would, lol.

      Alex

      1. Hi Alex,

        Did you autofill your running coefficients or manually fill in?

        Latest spreadsheets done in “Blood and Custard” colour scheme. Used the colour picker from micosoft powertoys to get a close match from some pics on the net. BR blue and grey next I think.

        Regards

        Mark

        1. Hi Mark

          Ha ha, love the railway theming ideas. Will you do Virgin Cross Country next? 😂

          Yes, back in the day (we’re talking around 20-25 years ago now) I had software that I had written myself in Visual Basic. I used it to enter the teams, then the results, and it added points to existing totals for the past five seasons (taking off the earliest ones) and recalculated coefficients accordingly. It was quite sophisticated in its functionality, albeit it didn’t look overly professional.

          I can’t use it any more as it doesn’t well work on modern computers and I’ve lost the tools to update it as well. Spreadsheets are much easier. 😉

          Alex

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