Manager van Holbeeck : Chelsea CL win has serious implications

The consequences of Chelsea winning the Champions League are that Anderlecht now is not automatically qualified for the group stages of next year’s CL and has to play in 2 preliminary qualifying rounds.

Financial wise, this is victory of the London based club is a real set-back for us says Anderlecht Manager Herman van Holsbeeck.
Anderlecht’s faith was connected to that of Chelsea. Chelsea could not qualify for next years CL in it’s own competition and therefore it’s only chance to be playing in next season’s CL was to win the final. In Germany Bayern did qualify for next years CL. If Bayern therefore had won the CL final yesterday, then Anderlecht would be directly qualified for the group phase of the CL and assure itself of 15 million Euro. Now that Chelsea has won Anderlecht need to start in the third and fourth qualifying rounds for the Champions League.

Plan A now becomes plan B
‘This is the second time that we miss the final stages of the Champions League through a penalty shoot’, said Manager van Holsbeeck referring to the lost penalty shoot-out against Partizan Belgrado last year. ‘We can’t change what happened, we will now have to do it through the qualifying rounds. This also means we now have to start training earlier’.
If Bayern had won, Anderlecht would have been assured of 15 million euro. That nice addition to the budget, is now gone for RSCA. ‘This result is mostly financially a major set-back for Anderlecht. And this will have an influence on the transfers. We always have a plan A and a plan B. Now we will have to revert to plan B, where we will need to look closely how we spent our money. We will now need to try and keep our key players’, said van Holsbeeck