Basel of Switzerland won an aggregate against Macacbi Tel Aviv of Israel in the Champions League Qualifying Round 3. The clubs will meet again in the Europa League Round of 32. Have two clubs ever played two aggregate series against each other in UEFA competitions in one season? It doesn't count if two clubs meet in a Group Stage and a Knockout Round.
Without checking, my hunch is that *if* this has happened before it would have happened in a different way: Most teams that win the 3rd round of CL qualifying (lets call this "Group A") lose in the playoff round anyway and thus are thrown into the EL group-stage with the team they beat in the 3rd round of CL qualifying (call those losers "group B"). We are talking about a large set of teams here: Group B = 15 teams and Group A = 10 teams. I would guess that on average 10 teams from Group B advance to the EL group-stage. That means there are about 10 potential matchups like this every year (ie where teams that met in qualifying are both involved in the group-stage of UEFA competitions). Lets say that for 30% of these pairings BOTH teams progress to the EL knockout stage. That means 3 pairs of teams who have met before are thrown into the EL knockout stage draw every year. hmmm... so my hunch is that this has happened before . Then again, this format has only existed for about 4-5 years.
Yeah, but the 3rd place teams in the group stage of UCL dropped into the UEFA Cup/Europa League since the 1999/2000 season.
Thank you for telling us when that started happening. I checked and two clubs have never met in two leg series in UEFA competitions twice in one season before. In addition to Basel-Maccabi Tel Aviv, there are two other pairings that could happen in the 2013-2014 Europa League after already happening in the Champions League qualifying rounds, Basel-Ludogorets Razgrad and Viktoria Plzen-Maribor.