The revamped Champions League kicks off this week with all the gushing hyperbole we have come to expect from this glossy, money-saturated event. Five British football teams will be in action along with a record 31 others for the first-round ‘league’ stage. The difference this year is that the marketing blitz is accompanied by earnest attempts to explain the new format – which is a tad complicated to say the least – and sell it to us.
There is one super-size ‘league’ in which teams play eight of their 35 (!) rivals once
We are now getting the ‘Swiss’ system, invented in the late 19th century by Julius Muller, a teacher and chess player from Brugg near Zurich. There is one super-size ‘league’ in which teams play eight of their 35 (!) rivals once, with the top eight finishers and eight from those finishing 9th to 24th (who play off in eight two-leg ties) progressing to the ‘round of 16’. It’s straight knock-out from there. Teams are initially ranked into four seeded pots and play two sides from each of these pots. Confused? You will be.
It all sounds like a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster with bits of various formats stitched together and animated – Uefa hopes – with a few million volts of promotional energy. It is perhaps the most complicated, but not the daftest tournament format in world football. For that I’d nominate the 2021-era Copa America which had groups of five with the top four progressing to the quarters (guest teams, including Japan once, were also allowed at one time).
Fans will eventually get their heads around the new Swiss format; but, more importantly, will it work? Well, perhaps. At the very least, the league stage will be no more boring and artificial than the current group phases. There is a bit more of it, but not so much that we are likely to get completely fed up, while regular juicy clashes such as AC Milan versus Liverpool and Man City versus Inter Milan this week should keep viewing figures buoyant. Uefa claims there will be more ‘winnable’ games for the lesser teams, too. We’ll see.
The second half, from early March 2025, will be the real deal, knock out, all or nothing, high stakes elite sport. In this way it is like an extended version of the Euros and World Cup, where the first round is fairly easy (with two-thirds of the teams advancing) and the serious action commences from the second phase. I suspect many armchair football fans daydream somewhat through the former and only pay full attention to the latter – something the advertising data analysts might want to investigate.
The fair-minded amongst the cynics will admit that there is something to be said for having a tournament where the continent’s top sides meet regularly. In the classic version of the European cup, the champions of Italy and Spain didn’t meet for almost a decade (most of the 70s) and one bad night from a great team and some dubious tactics from a lesser side could see strong attractive football playing teams dumped out in the first round. There is also nothing essentially wrong with making a buck, even a mega-buck.
Is it for the good of the game, though? One is tempted to lament the further degradation of this once straightforward and democratic tournament into a description defying (it’s not really a league and half the teams in it aren’t champions), revenue-gouging exercise. The league phase looks expertly designed to allow the nearly bankrupt mega clubs to service their colossal debts. There will now be eight and almost certainly ten guaranteed ‘big’ games a season. Ker-ching!
Then there is what the new format, and the constant tinkering, portends. Many view this new arrangement as a continuation of the Super League concept by other means. That breakaway failed in 2021 but its promoters, who in their ruinously indebted state have little choice but to be fiscally ruthless, were not deterred. The attitude seemed to be, to quote Jean Claude Juncker before the vote on the EU constitution by France in 2005: ‘If it is a “Yes” we will say “on we go”, and if it is a “No” we will say “we continue”.
But continue to where? To paraphrase the novellist John Updike, for the football super-clubs, money is like sex: only too much is enough. The Swiss-style champions league feels like a ‘get acquainted’ offer – an intermediate of a long-term project to ruthlessly monetise the world’s premier football competition (in terms of quality). It seems to want to do so until all traces of its original incarnation, when proudly unglamorous provincial teams with virtually zero ‘global reach’ – like Malmo and Nottingham Forest – could reach the final, have been entirely expunged. In subsequent phases, the only thing that will matter will be money, with matches being played on the basis of their revenue-generating potential alone.
So, it will be interesting to see whether fans are beguiled by the hype and the superficially exciting league phase match-ups, or whether they are more concerned by the direction of travel. And if it is the latter, what can be done?
Jean Claude Juncker again: ‘If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don’t understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back’.
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