It speaks something about the new Champions League that, as executives prepared to travel to Nyon for Thursday's draw, one of the most often asked questions was, "How does this actually work, then?" Many others are still wrapping their heads around it. They will not be alone. UEFA has had to issue a deluge of explainers for the expanded 36-team super-group stage.
It implies that the draw will do more than merely determine who plays who in a series of relatively meaningless group games.It is the first phase in a three-year process that will transform our understanding of and interaction with football. This will not be the last time someone approaches one of the main events and wonders how it works. There's also the World Cup, which is expanding to 48 teams while simultaneously losing its feeling of self-contained elite competition. In between, there's the increased 32-team Club World Cup at the end of this season, assuming it even happens.
It truly is a new era, complete with updated theme music.
You've probably observed that "expansion" appears to be football's only solution to every problem or dispute. All of this is straining the rest of the calendar, to the point where we've already lost FA Cup replays.
There will undoubtedly be more, as well as several issues, including legal challenges. These are obviously unusual measures for a sport whose main strength is its simplicity.
It truly is a new era, complete with updated theme music.
You've probably observed that "expansion" appears to be football's only solution to every problem or dispute. All of this is straining the rest of the calendar, to the point where we've already lost FA Cup replays.
There will undoubtedly be more, as well as several issues, including legal challenges. These are obviously unusual measures for a sport whose main strength is its simplicity.
That's not how you'd define the new Champions League, which is worth laying out. With four new clubs, 36 will now compete in a single open league stage, with each playing eight different teams in one-off matches. That is already a two-match increase for each, with a significant addition of European fixtures coming in January. This implies no winter break. It is essentially a full European season running concurrently with the domestic season.
Gianni Infantino and Giorgio Marchetti compete in a draw at the UEFA headquarters.
The logistics of this group stage, as well as the challenge of dividing teams into pools of fixtures, are so complicated that UEFA must conduct the majority of the draw electronically, which would otherwise take four hours. Fans of Giorgio Marchetti's theatrical drawing of balls from pots will still receive a sense of the drama because certain finer elements are manually sorted. The majority of these will be seeding-related, as one of the goals of this expansion is to include more matches between prominent teams in the group stages.
It may mean that Manchester City again faces Real Madrid in the group stage, but with a possible home game offset by an away game in, say, Leipzig. The seedings are still divided into groups of four.
It may mean that Manchester City again faces Real Madrid in the group stage, but with a possible home game offset by an away game in, say, Leipzig. The seedings are still divided into groups of four.
The eight games that each of the 36 clubs plays are then combined into one large table - a super league, if you will. The top eight will automatically qualify for the Champions League's historic last-16 stage, while positions nine through 24 in the table will then compete in another "play-off" stage for the remaining eight spots. This is done in part to keep more games competitive as the season progresses through the group stage, as well as to compliment how teams will be seeded in the knockout stage based on their table position. The latter is referred known as a "Wimbledon-style" system since it keeps first and second place on different sides of the draw, and the notion is that the wealthiest clubs will still be incentivized to field their strongest squad for the occasion.
The reality is that once they've secured qualification, teams are unlikely to be concerned about whether they're on the same side as fifth or sixth place, potentially resulting in a number of games that aren't quite dead rubbers but aren't exactly vibrant competitive contests. And there'll be plenty of that. The group stage will now feature 144 matches. Since there are 193 teams in the competition, 74.6% of the games will be used to eliminate only one-third of them.
It does not appear to be addressing the recent issues of the opening round, instead replacing predictability with a lengthy procedure.
The new system should put top clubs against one other more frequently, albeit with less at stake.
For UEFA, the so-called Swiss system proved to be the most effective of all their concepts, and the formula has performed successfully in Romanian cup competitions. That is still predicated on a competitive balance, so it's important to remember why we're all here in the first place.
The Champions League group stage was becoming a problem, with the issue of imbalance extending into the final 16, however this was due to excessive financial inequality rather than the system. The wealthiest 15 almost always qualified, with one exception. Rather than confront this, UEFA has avoided the issue. Groups were predictable, so it just removed them. There were too many dead rubbers, therefore the games were staggered.
Instead, we have this "super league" that comes at the same time as so many less rich clubs are separated into the Europa Conference League.
It appears that the large clubs got what they wanted in a rather convoluted way: more games against each other and a higher chance of consistently qualifying. That is not a coincidence. This was all negotiated upon the day after the inaugural Super League was started in April 2021, with the major clubs using the threat of a breakaway for years to guarantee these reforms became a routine.
So much for the magnificent victory. Football simply became more of the same because it was subjected to bigger forces.
The World Cup is seeing a similar phenomenon. Although there is great merit to the idea of expanding in order to eventually distribute the richness of the game outside Western Europe, it is difficult to separate from larger factors. Gianni Infantino, who has been at odds with UEFA President Aleksander Ceferin, needs more money to fulfill electoral pledges and keep his voting base satisfied. That can only happen through expansion, which is why FIFA is focusing on club football with the expanded Club World Cup.
Future World Cups, like as the 2030 tournament split among six host nations, will be larger than ever.
It ultimately boils down to capitalizing on the game's popularity in order to increase revenue, but the obvious question is why. Does this really help the game's development?
If anything, the adjustments of the last two decades appear to have resulted in more of the big clubs playing games that aren't all that important. How else would you define this expanded group stage? It all contributes to this apparently never-ending football schedule, in which everything is promoted as massive, but less and fewer games feel like it. Domestic competitions are devalued, allowing already affluent clubs to play more matches without consequence.
Even the argument that this improves money for others outside the elite just implies that the already wealthy will receive a somewhat larger share of a much larger pot.
That is also why the current discussion about the sport's true evolution is so important. Such large-scale changes alter the psychological architecture of the sport. You're not really paying attention to what you know anymore. Many might argue that this was mentioned when the World Cup increased from 24 to 32 teams, but there is clearly much more going on here.
Even with that, the 32-team Champions League never felt as intense as it did in the 1990s. This is because expansion has worsened financial gaps.
With modern football, more is actually becoming less. That is one thing, and Thursday's Champions League draw will make that plain. The question should not be how it works, but rather who it is working for.
It ultimately boils down to capitalizing on the game's popularity in order to increase revenue, but the obvious question is why. Does this really help the game's development?
If anything, the adjustments of the last two decades appear to have resulted in more of the big clubs playing games that aren't all that important. How else would you define this expanded group stage? It all contributes to this apparently never-ending football schedule, in which everything is promoted as massive, but less and fewer games feel like it. Domestic competitions are devalued, allowing already affluent clubs to play more matches without consequence.
Even the argument that this improves money for others outside the elite just implies that the already wealthy will receive a somewhat larger share of a much larger pot.
That is also why the current discussion about the sport's true evolution is so important. Such large-scale changes alter the psychological architecture of the sport. You're not really paying attention to what you know anymore. Many might argue that this was mentioned when the World Cup increased from 24 to 32 teams, but there is clearly much more going on here.
Even with that, the 32-team Champions League never felt as intense as it did in the 1990s. This is because expansion has worsened financial gaps.
With modern football, more is actually becoming less. That is one thing, and Thursday's Champions League draw will make that plain. The question should not be how it works, but rather who it is working for.
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