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Panathinaikos Athens vs Sturm Graz (Oct-22) |
Club Brugge vs Partizan (Oct-22) |
The UEFA Europa League is a new 2009-10 competition, which replaces the UEFA Cup. The Europa league is contested by 160 European Football Clubs, of which 8 come from the Champions League qualifying elimination. It is an annual European Football Cup tournament organized by UEFA. Normally each UEFA Country Member is assigned a certain number of berths into this competition based on their UEFA coefficient score. More places are offered to European Football nations with more points. It is up to the member FA to determine how those berths are assigned.
The main format difference between the UEFA cup and the UEFA Europa League is that in the new format is comprised of 12 groups of 4 football clubs competing in a two-match round robin as opposed to the previous format where there were 8 groups of 5 football clubs in a single match round robin. Other changes regarding the qualification have also been introduced in order to broaden the geographic access to this competition.