The French qualifiers for the Europa League are Lille, who finished 5th, and the French Cup winners.
The French Cup Final on 24th May is between PSG and Reims.
If PSG win, France’s 2nd Europa League spot will go to the 6th place team, who are John Textor’s Olympique Lyonaise. Could this snatch our hard-won European dream away from us?
Has anybody looked at this?
Needless to say, I shall be supporting Reims on Saturday.
I asked Claude, the gist of it is we should take priority. Sorry it is long but it is a bit complicated
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There would indeed be a multi-club ownership issue that could prevent both clubs from competing in the Europa League.
UEFA has strict regulations about multi-club ownership to maintain the integrity of their competitions. Under their current rules, clubs with the same owner (or where one owner has significant influence over another club) cannot participate in the same UEFA competition simultaneously.
The key threshold is typically around 30% ownership or having "decisive influence" over a club. However, even a minority stake can trigger these rules if it's deemed to give the owner significant control or influence over sporting decisions.
In this scenario, UEFA would likely require one of several solutions:
Structural separation - The owner would need to reduce their stake below the threshold of influence in one of the clubs, often involving selling shares to independent parties or placing them in a blind trust.
Sporting exclusion - If structural changes aren't made by UEFA's deadline (usually several months before the competition), the club that qualified later or has the lower coefficient ranking would be excluded from the competition.
Administrative arrangements - In some cases, very specific governance structures might be acceptable to UEFA, but these are rare and require extensive documentation.
Recent examples include the complications faced by clubs in the Red Bull network and Manchester City/Girona situations, where ownership structures had to be modified to comply with UEFA regulations.
The clubs would need to address this well before the competition begins, as UEFA typically requires compliance documentation months in advance.
I'll search for the current UEFA coefficients for Crystal Palace and Reims to give you accurate information.
Now let me search for Reims' UEFA coefficient:
Based on my search results, I can provide you with the UEFA coefficients for both clubs:
Crystal Palace: 17.146
Crystal Palace has a UEFA coefficient of 17.146, which puts them at the same level as most other English clubs that haven't had recent European experience.
Stade de Reims: 11.033
Stade de Reims has a UEFA coefficient of 11.033, placing them among the lower-tier French clubs in terms of European experience.
So Palace has a notably higher coefficient than Reims (17.146 vs 11.033). This means that if there were a multi-ownership issue requiring one club to be excluded from the Europa League, UEFA would likely exclude Reims as the club with the lower coefficient.
Interestingly, the search results show that Crystal Palace won their first ever major trophy by beating Manchester City 1-0 in the 2025 FA Cup final, which has qualified them for their first-ever Europa League campaign. Meanwhile, Reims reached the French Cup final but would play Paris Saint-Germain on May 24 - so presumably they qualified for the Europa League through their domestic league position in Ligue 1.
The coefficient difference would definitely favor Palace retaining their spot if ownership complications arose."
