Athens Olympic Stadium Attendance: Attendance 25,756.
Assisted by Dusan Tadic with a cross.Match ends, Ajax 2, APOEL Nicosia 0.Club Bruges and Slavia Prague also came through play-offs to reach the group stages.Tomás De Vincenti (APOEL Nicosia) wins a free kick in the defensive half.Attempt saved. Assisted by Dusan Tadic.The draw, which includes Manchester City, Tottenham, Chelsea and Liverpool, will take place in Monaco on Thursday at 17:00 BST.Daley Blind (Ajax) wins a free kick in the defensive half.The latest rumours and stories from around the world of football.Ajax reached the Champions League group stages thanks to a play-off victory over Apoel Nicosia.Attempt missed.

They are ready to continue.Summer signing Edson Alvarez headed in Hakim Ziyech's free-kick for the opening goal.The Dutch side needed to come through two rounds of qualifiers despite their run to the last four last season, when they were beaten by Tottenham Hotspur.Foul by Lucas Souza (APOEL Nicosia).Second Half ends, Ajax 2, APOEL Nicosia 0.André Vidigal (APOEL Nicosia) wins a free kick in the defensive half.Substitution, Ajax.

Klaas Jan Huntelaar (Ajax) right footed shot from outside the box is close, but misses to the left.

Dani de Wit replaces Hakim Ziyech.Delay over. Klaas Jan Huntelaar (Ajax) header from the centre of the box is saved in the top centre of the goal.

Harsh as this seems, it is not entirely without rational explanation: Uefa allocated places for this season’s European competitions based on the rankings as they stood a year ago, so that teams started their domestic campaigns last August knowing precisely how many places they were vying for and how they would be distributed.

Dani de Wit (Ajax) right footed shot from outside the box is saved in the bottom left corner. Ajax reached the Champions League group stages thanks to a …


Dutch champions Ajax needed to come through two rounds of qualifiers to reach the group stages. At least Ajax now know that with one more run to the semi-finals this year the Dutch champions will, almost certainly, finally earn an automatic place in the Champions League group … The points won by all the clubs in each association in a season are then added up and divided by the number of clubs involved to give a single figure, correct to three decimal places.

When they travelled to Amsterdam that October they earned a draw thanks to that 94th-minute Mario Balotelli penalty; in the return fixture in December Riccardo Montolivo was sent off in the 22nd minute and Ajax launched an assault on the home goal.

Most obviously, it discriminates against good teams from poor leagues, who are forever hobbled by the underperformance of their compatriots, some of which occurred quite a long time ago.It is hard to argue that this year’s Ajax team should be in any way disadvantaged by Utrecht’s Europa League defeat to Zenit St-Petersburg two years ago, let alone the same team’s abject humbling by Luxembourg’s Differdange way back in the 2013-14 qualifiers. In August 2013 the Rossoneri comfortably beat PSV Eindhoven in the Champions League play-offs and were then placed in Group H, along with Ajax. Meanwhile the top four nations, who automatically get four places in the Champions League, immediately start racking up massive bonuses, making them extremely hard to dislodge.Uefa’s calculation of coefficients penalises good teams in weak leagues and takes into account matches played six years agoEqually, the fact that Young Boys enter this year’s Champions League in the play-off round is almost entirely down to Basel’s run to the Europa League quarter-finals in 2013-14. The Dutch side had 64% of possession and 23 shots, 11 of them on target, to Milan’s combined total of three, but none went in and the game ended goalless.

Foul by Klaas Jan Huntelaar (Ajax).Attempt saved.

Assisted by Dusan Tadic. At least Ajax now know that with one more run to the semi-finals this year the Dutch champions will, almost certainly, finally earn an automatic place in the Champions League group stage – even if they will have to wait until 2021 to make use of it.At this point it is sadly necessary to go into the details of how Uefa calculate their coefficients.

As Ajax meet APOEL in the Champions League play-offs, watch a fine goal from their 4-0 win against the same opponents in the 2014/15 group stage.

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