According to the saying, good things come in threes so the recent proposal to employ a play-off for Champions League qualification certainly shows English football head honchos are way off the mark.

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Plans in recent years such as Lord Mawhinney’s idea to settle games with penalties and the infamous 39th game proposal have been joined with the Premier League’s plan to open up qualification for Europe’s elite competition.

The ‘big four’ have qualified for the Champions League in five of the previous six seasons and the repetitiveness of the league table come May has forced Richard Scudamore at looking to break them up.

Observers to the strongest league in world football will notice that possibly something needs to be done to help teams outside the top four in breaking that Champions League code, but a play-off is not the answer.

The play-offs for sides in the Football League puts plans for transfer activity back by a few weeks, in which time targets may already have been snapped up.

For those sides chasing the Champions League the financial implications are much greater than those in the lower leagues and losing out on players worth £10, £20, £30million would be a much worse set of circumstances.

To play around with a team potentially receiving millions upon millions of pounds is surely not the way to go.

Should Harry Redknapp, Roberto Mancini or Martin O’Neill be the man to lead their sides into the untouchable top four I highly doubt that they would appreciate having to play three more games to prove they are worthy of fourth place.

The hard work of actually breaking up the top four would be a case on its own of how unfair this rule would be.

The Premier League have been looking at ways of how to break up the top four, or at least make sure it has more competition to become a potential top five or top six, for some time.

The new play-off proposal would come into play next season but should, for example, Liverpool fail to stay in the top four and City, Spurs or Villa take their place, would the Premier League be so keen then to implement the rule? Their work would already have been done for them.

If Liverpool go on and continue their residence inside the top four this season, then it will be interesting to see how much support an idea of a play-off gathers.

Hopefully, for commonsense, it will fall away as previous dismal ideas have.