Benfica Lost in Switzerland: Europe Is Back and Already Chaotic

European football came back on Thursday night through the side door — the second qualifying round of the Europa League and Conference League, the rounds nobody puts on a poster — and inside two hours it produced the kind of results that would be front-page news in October.

Benfica lost in Switzerland. Hibernian lost in Kosovo. FCSB lost at home to a Latvian club. If your group is planning to run a pool through the qualifiers, read this first (ESPN).

What actually happened

St. Gallen 2-1 Benfica. Aliou Baldé put the Swiss side ahead in the 37th minute, Rafa Silva leveled it for Benfica, and Tom Gaal headed in the winner in the 80th from a free kick. St. Gallen pressed high for the full ninety and their goalkeeper Lawrence Ati Zigi held the rest of it together (ESPN, Bluewin).

FCSB 2-3 FK Auda. The Romanian champions lost at home to a club from Latvia.

KF Malisheva 2-0 Hibernian. The Kosovan side kept a clean sheet against the Scottish visitors.

Polissya 3-3 Copenhagen. Six goals, and the Danish side came away with a draw in Ukraine.

The rest of Thursday’s first legs went closer to script: Vojvodina 1-4 Ajax · Sheriff Tiraspol 0-5 Maccabi Tel-Aviv · HJK Helsinki 5-0 Coleraine · Dynamo Kyiv 2-3 PAOK · FC Twente 1-2 Ferencváros · Hajduk Split 2-0 Pafos · Beşiktaş 1-0 Midtjylland.

One thing to keep straight: these are first legs. Nobody has gone out and nobody has gone through. The return matches are next week, and a 2-1 in Switzerland is a long way from a result.

Why these rounds wreck pools

Qualifying is the part of the European calendar where the usual shortcuts stop working, for three reasons that are all structural.

One: the big club is out of season and the small club isn’t. Benfica are weeks from their competitive league form. St. Gallen are already sharp because the Swiss calendar puts them there. Half of these ties are between a team in preseason and a team in mid-season, and the reputation gap doesn’t survive that.

Two: the squads aren’t finished. The transfer window is open until deep into the summer, and the clubs playing these rounds are still signing and selling. You are picking teams that will not look the same in three weeks. That’s true across Europe right now — the summer transfer tracker has moves landing every single day.

Three: almost nobody in your group has watched these teams. Be honest about it. When the name on the team sheet is the only information anyone has, everybody in the pool picks the same way — by badge — and one result takes out the whole group at once.

That last point is the one worth building a pool around. A round where everyone guesses the same is a round decided by whoever guessed differently and got it right.

How to actually score a round like this

If you’re running picks through the qualifiers, a few practical calls:

• Score the first legs and the return legs separately. Treating a two-legged tie as one pick throws away half the games and hides who actually read the first leg correctly.
• Expect draws and decide how they count now. Polissya 3-3 Copenhagen is exactly the result that starts an argument if the rules weren’t set in advance.
• Don’t run elimination formats through qualifying. A Survivor pool where one wrong pick ends your run is brutal in a round where a Latvian club wins in Bucharest. Save that format for a league season where you have form to read — in Quini’s Survivor mode a draw keeps your life and only a loss costs you one, which softens it, but qualifying is still the hardest place to start.

The real season is four weeks out

The Premier League starts Friday, August 21 — the one confirmed hard date on the European calendar so far, with LaLiga and Serie A landing in mid-to-late August. Everything in the 2026-27 kickoff calendar is built around that.

Which makes these qualifying rounds a decent trial run. Small stakes, weird fixtures, and a low-pressure way to find out whether your scoring rules survive contact with a chaotic week before the games that matter start arriving every weekend.

Frequently asked questions

Were any teams knocked out on Thursday? No. These were first legs of the second qualifying round. The return matches are played the following week.

Which competitions were these? The UEFA Europa League and UEFA Conference League second qualifying rounds, played on the same night.

Why do qualifying rounds produce so many surprises? Teams from different leagues meet at completely different points in their seasons, squads are still changing during the transfer window, and there is very little recent head-to-head history between the clubs involved.

Is a two-legged tie one pick or two in a pool? That’s your group’s call, but scoring each leg separately gives you twice the data and avoids arguments about how to treat the aggregate.

Set the group up before August 21

If you’ve never run one, here’s what a quiniela is and how to run a prediction pool without a spreadsheet. Rules are yours, scoring is automatic, and the table updates while the match is still going.

Get Quini free and have the group ready before the real season starts.