Arsenal, Porto await Euro fate in today's draw
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E-mail Shanghai Daily, August 8, 2014
Arsenal and Porto are among the clubs entering the Champions League qualifying campaign when the draw for the last-round playoffs is held today.
Arsenal, chasing a 17th straight group-stage campaign, and two-time European champion Porto are the highest-ranked teams in the 20-team draw.
They are seeded with Zenit St Petersburg, 2002 runner-up Bayer Leverkusen and Napoli in the section for teams which are not national champions.
Their unseeded opponents are Athletic Bilbao, Lille, Copenhagen, Standard Liege and Besiktas. The Turkish club advanced from the third qualifying round on Wednesday with a hat trick from former Chelsea forward Demba Ba to beat Netherlands' Feyenoord 3-1 and complete a 5-2 aggregate win.
"He is not 100 percent but fit to play," Besiktas coach Slaven Bilic said of his new signing.
Clubs from the top five leagues in UEFA rankings — Spain, England, Germany, Italy and Portugal — join in the fourth and final qualifying round, with two-leg matches set for August 19-20 and August 26-27.
In the champions section, 1986 European Cup winner Steaua Bucharest is seeded with Salzburg, APOEL, BATE Borisov and Ludogorets Razgrad.
Potential opponents are Maribor, Legia Warsaw, Slovan Bratislava, 1979 runner-up Malmo and Aalborg.
Playoff winners join the 22 clubs directly qualified for the group stage. The eight four-team groups are drawn on August 28 in Monaco. The 10 playoff losers enter the second-tier Europa League group stage, drawn on August 29.
Though each playoff team gets 2.1 million euros (US$2.8 million) from UEFA, the real prize comes in the six-match Champions League group stage which kicks off in September.
UEFA pays a basic 8.6-million euro fee for reaching the group stage, plus 1 million euros per win and 500,000 euros per draw. Teams also get a share of television rights money in a near 1-billion euro payout shared by the 32 group teams.
Arsenal's streak of claiming a share of that bonanza started in the 1998-99 season.
Prize money
Zenit was fined 6 million euros of its prize money last season by UEFA for breaching Financial Fair Play rules, and is restricted to registering only 22 senior players in this year's competition instead of the usual 25-man squad.
Led by former Porto and Chelsea coach Andre Villas-Boas, Zenit got two late goals on Wednesday to beat AEL Limassol of Cyprus 3-0 and advance 3-1 on aggregate.
In the champions section, Legia routed group-stage regular Celtic 6-1 on aggregate, and perennial qualifier Dinamo Zagreb lost at home to Aalborg.
Danish champion Aalborg is the lowest ranked of the 20 playoff teams, earning its place with a 2-0 win in Zagreb, to advance 2-1 on aggregate.
Copenhagen, the Danish league runner-up, also advanced with a 2-0 second-leg win over Dnipro of Ukraine to remove one security problem from the Champions League.
UEFA has deemed some Ukraine cities, including Dnipropetrovsk, unsafe to host matches during ongoing conflict with pro-Russian separatists.
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