Last year’s Eredivisie champions Ajax have been denied to repeat while ADO Den Haag and RKC Waalwijk will remain in the competition next season despite looking set to go down.
Ajax was denied the Eredivisie title after the 2019-20 season was ended early due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Eredivisie announced that current standings will be recognized as final after an announcement from prime minister Mark Rutte stating all soccer matches are forbidden until September 1st.
As a result, the current table was made final, although Ajax will not be awarded the title for finishing first. This will be the first time that the Eredivisie will not have a designated champion in the 64-year history of the competition.
The last time the Eredivisie had no champion crowned was during World War II. They yielded a winner every year since it was founded in 1956.
The decision to finalize the table the way it was, was made after UEFA asked the Dutch Federation to maintain the current standings to determine which teams would be awarded spots in next year’s European competitions.
Ajax will head straight to the last round of UEFA Champions League qualification despite being level on points with AZ Alkmaar, who will enter in the second round of qualifiers.
In a normal scenario, Ajax would have been sent directly into the group stages, since the winner of the current Eredivisie was supposed to qualify after winning their own league. Ajax is now going into the qualifiers because of the uncertainty surrounding this season’s UEFA Champions League.
Feyenoord, on the other hand, will head to the UEFA Europa League group stage as they were in third place while PSV and Willem II will enter the UEFA Europa League in the third and second round of qualifiers respectively.
Willem II was awarded a UEFA Europa League spot in controversial fashion as they were the fifth-place team, with one more match than sixth-place FC Utrecht, who was three points behind with a much better goal difference.
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