Europa League draw: Sparta will play Scottish Rangers and Lyon! Who will face West Ham?

Sparta Prague, the only Czech representative in the Europa League, can look forward to very interesting opponents in the Europa League group stage. It has been awarded Olympique Lyon, Bröndby Copenhagen and Glasgow Rangers, which no Czech fan will be able to erase from his memory.

The draw for the preliminary groups for the Europa League took place in Istanbul, Turkey, shortly after noon on Friday, just like the draw for the Champions League. Unusually this year, only eight balls were spun in the pool of each performance basket for groups A to H.

These were then drawn by two former great Spanish footballers – Andres Palop symbolically as the representative of Sevilla, the most successful team in the competition, and Marcos Senna as the former Villarreal midfielder who dominated the last edition of the Europa League and where the final of this year’s competition will be played.

But now to the draw itself and the journey for Czech fans of the two undoubtedly most interesting teams in this year’s Europa League – Sparta and West Ham with two Czech national team players at their core.

Sparta is the only Czech representative in this competition. It fought its way into it through Champions League qualification, in which it only needed to get past Rapid Vienna in the second preliminary round to secure the Europa League group stage. It will thus repeat its participation last year, when it failed to make it out of the group.

She will not have an easy time this time either. In Group A, she will face Lyon of France, whom she also played against nine years ago in the Europa League and even eight years earlier in the Champions League. 3 losses, 1 draw.

Spartans’ next opponent will be Glasgow Rangers. A team that perhaps needs no introduction. Anyway, Steven Gerard and his team are looking forward to the big Prague rematch.

And the third in the bunch? That’s Bröndby, the Danish side that even managed to dominate the top competition last year. However, they are the biggest underdog in the group, so the Prague club is definitely in a position to at least qualify for the spring stage of one of the European cups.

West Ham celebrated their first ever promotion to the group stage of a European club competition in their modern history, thanks to a sixth-place finish in last season’s Premier League.

However, his debut will not be easy, either in view of the oft-maligned narrow squad with which he has to play towards 50 games during the season, or in view of his drawn opponents.

He will face Croatian champion Dynamo Zagreb, Austrian runner-up Rapid Vienna and Belgian Genk. However, in the whole Group H is without a doubt the biggest favourite and anything other than first place should not be an ambition for Soucek and co.

Other Czech players who will play in the main stage of the Europa League this year are striker Patrik Schick with Bayer Leverkusen (Group G), goalkeeper Tomas Vaclik with Olympiakos (Group D), Filip Novak with Fenerbahce (Group D) and Tomas Pekhart with Legia Warsaw (Group C).

All teams will enter the new Europa League season on Thursday 16 September, so they have less than three weeks to prepare. The next matches will take place on 30 September, 21 October, 4 and 25 November and finally on 9 December. The final of the competition is scheduled for 18 May in Seville.

Changes to the Europa League format

It should be recalled that with the creation of the third European club competition, there have been significant changes to the format of the Europa League. The number of groups has dropped from a dozen to eight, with only 32 participants instead of 48.

Another significant change is that this year only the first team of each group will advance directly to the eighth finals of the second continental club competition.

The second-placed teams will still face a preliminary round against those who finish third in the Champions League groups. The same will apply to the third-placed teams in the Europa League. They will still get a chance in the preliminary round of the European Conference League.

The 2021/22 Europa League group fixtures:

Group A: Lyon (FRA), Rangers (SKO), Sparta Prague (CZE), Brönby (DEN)

Group B:: Monaco (FRA), Eindhoven (NIZ), Real Sociedad (SPA), Graz (RAK)

Group C:: Naples (ITA), Leicester (ANG), Spartak Moscow (RUS), Legia Warsaw (POL)

Group D:: Olympiakos (GRE), Frankfurt (GER), Fenerbahce (TUR), Antwerp (BEL)

Group E: Lazio Rome (ITA), Lokomotiv Moscow (RUS), Marseille (FRA), Galatasaray (TUR)

Group F:: Braga (POR), Crvena zvezda (SRB), Ludogorets (BUL), Midtjylland (DÁN)

Group G: Leverkusen (GER), Celtic (SKO), Betis Sevilla (SPAIN), Ferencváros (HUNGARY)

Group H:: Dinamo Zagreb (CHO), Genk (BEL), West Ham (ANG), Rapid Vienna (RAK)

Source: UEFA Europa League