Lost CL place, please explain???

At the end on the fifth season in I get a message saying Germany (where I manage) has lost one of their Champions league spots due to poor performance in europe.

In this five years three german clubs have won between them the Champions league and Europa league 3 times each and the Euro Supercup twice. The national coeffecient each year had ranked germany 2nd,4th,4th,3rd,4th; never below any except ENG, ESP, ITA.

How is it that a CL Pace is lost? German teams won 6 of the 10 major trophies plus 2/5 supercups and theis is a poor European performance?

Each match a German team plays in Europe counts towards the co-efficients with an annual total for each country shown on the co-efficients page.

For rankings purposes the last 5 seasons count towards your total at any point with countries ranked my total points gained. I'm fairly certain 1st-3rd get four places in the Champions League whilst 4th only gets three places in the Champions League (You can check what places get what within FM).

So to clarify over the last five seasons English, Spanish & Italian clubs have done better in Europe than German clubs overall leaving Germany 4th and losing a Champions League place that they gained last season when they were ranked 3rd.

It is to do with all the clubs, for example when I was in Iceland I struggled to ever get more than 2 CL places as I was the only club who managed any kind of success (I was ranked 14th in Europe) but the rest were ranked 80ish.

Thanks Cougar, that explains it. I didnt realise the four places for 1-3 was set, and I guess I figured that when three different teams win 8 of 15 european trophies between them in 5 years that might count for something.

Well for one thing, the Supercup does not count in any way towards the coefficient so that does not matter. Also as cougar said, dropping to 4th is a loss in CL spot, and since Germany finished 4th in coefficients 3 out of the 5 years, its not hard to see how they fell to 4th. One thing to keep in mind when nations are battling for 3rd and 4th place is that due to the extra CL spot, the 3rd nation has more teams at 7 contributing to the coefficient than the 4th which has 6. Since the sum of the coefficients is divided by the amount of teams, its fairly easy for the 3rd nation to get overtaken if any of the teams happen to stumble.

To show this, a team from Germany when they are ranked third that gained the most amount of points to win the champions league starting from group stage would contribute 5.428 to the national coefficient (13 wins for 26 points + 12 bonus points, divided by 7) while a Italy team that won the championship in the same scenario would contribute 6.333 points. If an Italy team wanted to contribute 5.428 points, they would only need to earn 32.5 points, while a Germany team needs 38 points.

it's like how italian league won't have a 4th place team in the champions league in the next few years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFA_coefficient#Association_coefficient_.28.22League_coefficient.22.29

im basic terms, each team gets 2 points for win (1 point for quals) and bonus points for qualifying for each stage, add up all points from all teams and divide by number of entered teams

It's the same issue Italy had, where Inter winning it one year simply wasn't enough. Inter have done alright in the Champions League for the last few years, but they are the only club to have done so. They can't keep the coefficient up alone.

Thanks for all the replies guys. I think I understand how the coeffs are worked out, I just though (without understanding the maths) that three teams combining for 3/5 CL and 3/5 Europa would have been enough to keep the extra place. The other teams must have bombed out. Nevermind, I dont plan on finishing 4th anyway!