Chelsea have completed the set. With a 4-1 win over Real Betis in the Conference League final, Enzo Maresca’s side became the first team in European history to win every major honor: two-time Champions League and Europa League winners who ensured that their season dominating the lowest tier of continental football ended in the only acceptable fashion.
Add their brace of UEFA Super Cups and the now defunct Cup Winners’ Cups, and theirs is a European trophy haul that for sheer variety few teams can match. Indeed, could anyone? Let us park the heritage competitions, yes, even the Intertoto Cup, for a minute. Who, if anyone, might follow Chelsea in sweeping the European prizes?
It’s not as straightforward an equation as you might immediately assume. Without wishing to state the obvious, teams actually have to play in the Conference League to win it.
It is extremely hard to envisage a world where some of the biggest teams on the continent struggle so dramatically in their domestic league that they drop down into the third tier. Obviously, your Real Madrids and Bayern Munichs come to mind, but let us imagine that perennial Scottish champions Celtic found themselves playing in and winning the Europa League in the near future, ticking off that box. They would then somehow have to have a sufficiently disastrous league campaign to end up dropping into the Conference League, where Scotland will be represented by Dundee United in the second qualifying round. Perhaps there’s a weird path through falling short in the Europa League qualifiers, but it’s not likely.
The European Cup is the other complicating factor. Our pool of teams is going to need to mostly include those who have won it already. There are maybe only three teams that have not already won it who have realistic prospects of winning the Champions League in the near future. Paris Saint-Germain are of course one of them, Atletico Madrid and Arsenal the others. Perhaps Newcastle have an argument. It’s hard to see many of them, maybe only the latter two, dropping into the Conference League all that often. Anyway, those two have a lot of trophies left to win.
There’s one other factor to consider, too. Could any of the three Conference League champions complete the set? Well, ermm, no. Perhaps a Europa League for West Ham or Roma but they and Olympiacos aren’t winning the big one. We have, then, our pool from which to select. We’ll be after teams who have already won a European Cup/Champions League and might realistically land themselves in the lower reaches of the continental game. Here are the best options we can come up with:
1. Manchester United
The challenge in picking out top teams who might complete the sweep is that to end up in the Conference League they’d have to have a domestic season of remarkable inadequacy that they then bounce back from with, well, at least normalcy. In the short term, it’s hard to see how things could go so badly wrong for, say, Liverpool that they wouldn’t get at least Europa League.
Then there’s Manchester United. After the travails of the last few months, any sort of 2025-26 season that ends with them qualifying for the Conference League ought to be viewed as an unmitigated triumph. Seventh place? Someone get a date in the diary for the awards do. A League Cup and 15th place? Does anyone have the number for an open-top bus?
If an English club gets into the Conference League, the evidence so far is that they will go pretty far. Each season of the competition has had a Premier League semifinalist with Tottenham the only club not to have made it to the last four. That was in the old format, in the new one, Chelsea’s B team managed to win every game to top the league phase. Surely it wouldn’t take much getting their act together for Manchester United to win the Conference League? The bigger challenge would be qualifying for it.
2. Juventus
If there’s another nation that comes close to England’s strength in depth, it’s Italy, where two clubs have won both the Champions and Europa League: Inter and Juventus. It’s the latter that seems a more likely pick to eventually find themselves in the Conference League. They might have snuck into the Champions League this season but given the institutional turbulence in Turin over recent years, a drop down the table seems credible for the near future.
Like the Premier League, Serie A’s recent record in the Conference League is impressive. And for Serie A, read Fiorentina, the Italian representatives in the three seasons that followed Roma’s triumph in the competition’s maiden season. La Viola have been extremely successful, if only in manufacturing heartbreak for their supporters. Successive final defeats were followed by a bruising extra time defeat to Betis. Might Juventus go a few steps further if given the chance?
3. Porto
The one Portuguese side to have won both the Champions League and Europa League, Porto have finished in the top three every year since 1974. That’s our real problem here given that it’d likely need them to dip down to fifth for them to move into the Conference League. Put them in this competition and they’d have as good a chance as anyone not from the Premier League and Serie A. The challenge is just getting them there.
4. The big three in the Netherlands
A fairly straightforward one, this. All three of Ajax, PSV Eindhoven and Feyenoord have two-thirds of the set and none should consider winning a Conference League beyond them. Indeed, Feyenoord very nearly beat Chelsea to the punch back in 2022, where they were beaten in the final by Roma.
For all three teams, there is a little bit of what we’re terming the Celtic dilemma that limits their chances. These teams finished first to third in the Eredivisie this season with fifth-placed AZ Alkmaar qualifying for the Conference League through a European playoff. Then again both Ajax and Feyenoord have shown in recent years that a drop-off season is possible. File this under plausible.
5. Borussia Dortmund
Here’s a slightly more long-shot option. Right now, Borussia Dortmund have won one of the three European trophies, the 1997 Champions League, to go with their 1966 Cup Winners’ Cup crown. They are also Champions League perennials who have featured in 13 of the last 14 seasons. That latter status is looking more tenuous in recent years though, a top-four finish this season only secured by two points, last year’s fifth enough to take them back to the competition in which they finished runners-up.
What would need to happen here is a continuation of the drip-drip decline of Dortmund in the league while they retain a level where they can win both the Conference and Europa League (probably in that order). It’s a narrow path but one that makes more sense than many of the scenarios we’ve got left.
That then, rather speaks to the paucity of teams who might ever replicate Chelsea’s feat. The Blues’ place in history might be unchallenged for a long while yet.
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