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It says something about the new Champions League that, as executives were preparing for their trip to Nyon for Thursday’s draw, one of the most common statements was: “How does this actually work, then?” Many are still getting their heads around it. They won’t be alone. Uefa has had to flood out explainers for the expanded 36-team super-group stage.
It means that the draw will do more than just decide who plays who in a series of largely inconsequential group games.
It is the first step in a three-year period that is going to change our understanding of and interaction with football. This won’t be the last time that people approach one of the major competitions and wonder how it works. There’s also the World Cup, that is bloating to 48 teams and at once removing its own sense of a self-contained elite event. In between, there’s the expanded 32-team Club World Cup at the end of this season, if it even takes place.
It really is a new era, with changed theme music, too.
You’ll have noticed the common word here is “expansion”, which seems to be football’s sole solution to any problem or dispute. All of that is meanwhile squeezing the rest of the calendar, to the point we have already lost FA Cup replays.
There will no doubt be more to come, as well as a host of complications, right up to legal challenges. These are certainly odd steps for a sport whose greatest virtue is its simplicity.
That certainly isn’t how you’d describe this new Champions League, which is worth at least laying out. With four extra teams, 36 will now go into one open league stage, and each play eight different teams in one-off matches. That is already an increase of two matches each, which will bring an additional important addition of European fixtures in January. That means no winter break. It is, in essence, almost a full European season now running alongside the domestic season.
The mechanics of this group stage – and the difficulty of splitting teams into pools of fixtures – are so complicated that Uefa has to do most of the draw electronically, as it would otherwise take four hours. Aficionados of Giorgio Marchetti theatrically drawing balls from pots will still get of an element of that drama as some finer details are sorted manually. Most of those will be related to seeding, since one of the ideas behind this expansion is that there are meant to be more matches between big clubs in the group stages.
It could mean, say, Manchester City again get Real Madrid in the group stage but with a potential home game there offset by an away fixture in, say, Leipzig. The seedings are still split into groups of four.
The eight games that each of the 36 teams play then go into one big table – a super league, if you like. The top eight will automatically qualify for the classic last-16 stage of the Champions League, although positions nine to 24 in the table will then go into another “play-off” stage for the remaining eight places. This is in part so as to keep more games competitive the further into the group the season goes, to complement how teams will be seeded in the knockout stage depending on where they finish in the table. The latter is being described as a “Wimbledon-style” format since it will keep first and second on opposite sides of the draw, and the theory is that the wealthiest clubs will still be incentivised to play their strongest team for the purpose.
The reality is far likelier to be clubs not too bothered over whether they’re on the same side as fifth or sixth once they’re secure of qualification, potentially creating a lot of games that aren’t truly dead rubbers but aren’t exactly live and lively competitive games. And there’ll be a lot of that. The group stage will now be 144 matches. Since that’s out of a total of 193 in the competition proper, that means 74.6% of the games will be used to eliminate just a third of the teams.
It doesn’t instinctively feel like it’s going to remove the opening round’s recent problems, instead replacing predictability with tedious process.
On that, for Uefa’s part, this so-called Swiss system did prove the most successful model out of all their ideas, and the format has worked well in Romanian cups. That is still based on a certain competitive balance, which is why it’s worth remembering why we’re all here in the first place.
The Champions League group stage was becoming a problem, with that issue of imbalance encroaching into the last 16, but that was down to extreme financial disparity, not the format. The wealthiest 15 almost always qualified, with maybe one surprise. Rather than address that, though, Uefa has sidestepped the problem. Groups were predictable so it just got rid of them. There were too many dead rubbers so it just staggered the games.
Instead, we have this “super league”, that comes at the same time so many less wealthy clubs are siloed into the Europa Conference League.
It looks a lot like the big clubs got what they wanted in a very roundabout way: more games against each other, and a greater likelihood of constantly qualifying. That is no coincidence. This was all agreed the day after the first Super League was launched in April 2021, with the big clubs leveraging the threat of that breakaway for years in order to ensures these changes became a formality.
So much for that great victory. Football just got more of the same, because it was subject to greater forces.
Similar is happening with the World Cup. Although there is considerable merit to the idea of expanding so as to finally spread the wealth of the game beyond western Europe, it’s difficult to divorce from wider forces. Gianni Infantino, who has been engaged in conflict with Uefa president Aleksander Ceferin, needs more money to make good on election promises so as to keep his voter base happy. That only comes through expansion, which is also the reason Fifa is honing in on club football through the expanded Club World Cup.
It all amounts to using the very popularity of the game in order to accumulate more income, but an obvious question is: why? Does this actually serve the game’s development?
If anything, these shifts of the past two decades only seem to have involved more of the big clubs playing more games that don’t matter that much. How else to describe this expanded group stage? It all feeds into this seemingly never-ending football calendar where everything is described as huge but fewer and fewer matches feel like it. Domestic competitions are devalued so already wealthy clubs can play more matches with little consequence.
Even the argument that this increases revenue to those outside the elite really just means a slightly bigger proportion of a much greater pot for the already wealthy.
That is also what is so important about this crucial debate on actual development of the sport. Wide-scale changes like this alter the psychological architecture of the sport. You’re not really watching what you know any more. Many would argue this was said when the World Cup expanded to 24 and 32 teams but there is clearly much more going on here.
Even on that, the 32-team Champions League never felt as intense as it was in the nineties. That’s because expansion also widened financial gaps.
With modern football, more really is becoming less. That is one thing, at least, Thursday’s Champions League draw is going to make that clear. The question shouldn’t really be how it works but who it is actually working for.
