Evann Guessand (on loan at Crystal Palace)

[Somniloquism]

Good point. Whilst the mention that we are the only English side who haven't won it when entered (which is wrong anyway), both Spam and Palace finished towards the bottom of the table where we finished 4th. We also had to put up with one of the biennual January Kamara injuries as well. I suspect if Rice had been injured in January for Spam during their season, they wouldn't have won and might have been relegated that year. Chelsea are ones who qualified for CL whilst winning it, but had a bomb squad who probably would have finished top 10 of the prem anyway, and without getting too blues, had no EL drop downs like we did.

[paul_e]

More simply, we qualified for the conference when we weren't really prepared for it and that weaker squad left us in a place where we had to pick between trying to get into the top4 or pushing for a trophy and we (correctly in hindsight) went with the longer-term benefits of making the Champions League.

[aj2k77]

The Conference was a little different when we were in it too. Just as the Champions League teams used to drop in to the Europa, the Europa teams would drop in to the Conference making it harder to win.

For comparison, some teams that were in the Conference league in our year went on to become Champions League sides in the league phase the next season.

Villa
Lille
Slovan Bratislava
Dinamo Zagreb
Brugge
Sturm Graz

I'm not sure if it's still like that now but on paper the quality seems much thinner and more padded out with Eastern European minnows.

[cdbearsfan]

Well, we finished 4th and won the Europa whilst Palace finished 15th and won the Conference. There's a big difference between the quality needed for one over the other. He probably is very much a 15th and Conference player whilst being very much not a 4th and Europa player. If we can get out even on him it would be a great deal.

They were 15th largely because of matches played before he arrived and after he got injured (in the latter case including a lot of matches where they didn't care because they were concentrating on Europe).

On a table based solely on matches from when he made his debut to when he got injured, they were 5th.