While this title seems a bit pointless because of this season Real Valladolid’s performance in the Spanish League (only 4 points above salvation with only 4 matches left), the Mendilibar’s team could play UEFA the next season due to their fair play.


UEFA rewards the Europe’s most sportsmanly three teams every season in order to promote fair play on the continental football. To achieve this, it selects one team for each country of Europe and then makes a darwing of three slots for the UEFA Cup. This year it will happen in May 13 at Manchester and Real Valladolid is the third most sportsmanly Spanish League’s team after FC Barcelona and Villarreal. However, these teams have an assured place to play European competitions the next season, so Real Valladolid is near to be selected as the Spanish representative. Of course, only if Deportivo who are at 2 points from Real Valladolid don’t surpass them before the raffle.


UEFA has in mind the behaviour of the supporters, the positive game, the respect to the referee and to the rival, and, of course, the number of yellow and red cards showed to the team’s players. Even though the priority for Real Valladolid is to survive one year more in the Spanish League, it is also true that they could play the UEFA Cup the next season.

Since 1966, Ricardo Pastor, a veteran sports journalist, predicts in detail the final position in the league table for First Division clubs in Spain. Everyone use to do the same every Sunday along the season but the merit of Ricardo Pastor is that he announces his predictions when still 10 Day matches must be played and also the most important is that in 42 years predictions he has only gone wrong 4 years and, honestly, the failures have been due to completely unusual performance of most of the clubs during the last matches of the league. One example was last season (2006/07) when FC Barcelona squandered his advantage over Real Madrid during last matches (unforeseen points looses at home in front of Betis and Espanyol among others abnormal results of both Barça and Madrid). In the predictions of Ricardo Pastor there is a lot of objective study about the performance of clubs along the season and overall doing a rigorous study and prediction for the results to be achieved during the last 10 matches. 90% success in 42 years in the variable world of football is a fantastic percentage very difficult to obtain.
His predictions for the present season, made on 20th March, are as follows: Real Madrid with 81 points will obtain the championship followed by FC Barcelona with 77 points, Villarreal with 71 points, Sevilla with 65 points (all 4 teams will obviously play next Champions League next season), Atletico Madrid with 64 points and Espanyol with 59 points (both will play for UEFA Cup). Ricardo also predicts that the three clubs that will go down to Second Division will be Valladolid with 42 points, Murcia with 37 points and Levante with 29 points.
So in eight weeks time or even less we will know the grade of success of above advanced predictions. Wait and see!