New Champions League format is already a disaster; there is no sport without jeopardy

The return of the Champions League has brought with it the usual chorus of complaints about fixture pile-up and workload.

Rodri has set off the Telegraph’s Spidey Senses by refusing to rule out strikes, Alisson has taken up Jurgen Klopp’s baton at Liverpool and absolutely all sane observers agree that it cannot be physically possible to continue adding more and more football to a calendar that stubbornly refuses to get any longer while expecting standards to remain the same.

And this year a conversation that has been going on for years is getting louder, because it’s the first year of UEFA’s new and impr… new Champions League format.

What we’re going to do now is talk about all the very many reasons that format is absolutely f***ed, but what’s important to remember right from the start here is that every single one of these reasons is feature not bug.

The new Champions League group stage or league stage or whatever we’re calling it now isn’t a long, bloated, tension-free blancmange of a tournament because UEFA made a bollocks of it; it’s because that’s exactly what they wanted. A Super League by stealth, a tournament that lobbed in a few more games between the biggest beasts but with the pay-off that none of those games actually contains any real peril whatsoever and must also be accompanied by a load more games between everyone else as well.

You’re surely on top of the specifics of the new format, but briefly: the old group stage is gone, replaced by one giant 36-team league table. Every team in that league plays eight games against eight different opponents, and it all gets sorted out from there.

First the positives. Well positive – there is only one. It’s that there are now definitely more games between big teams. In the old group stage, a pot one team would face nobody else from pot one in the group stage and would be unlikely to do so in the last 16 either. Sure, there were still big teams in pot two and occasionally you’d accidentally get a group with two of the big clubs in direct competition, but generally they’ve been kept apart.

Now, every team plays two games against teams from every pot in the draw, including their own. But here’s the thing: most of those games will mean close to f*** all.

Rodri is absolutely right to say we should be playing fewer games, but surely he couldn’t have expected that City would immediately be involved in one that nobody would miss. A drab goalless draw with Inter in a game devoid of jeopardy, context or peril of any kind. That it was a repeat of the 2022 final only sharpened the focus of how little it matters.

And again, the lack of jeopardy is entirely intentional and baked in. It looks like this because that’s precisely how it’s meant to look.

There’s a compelling argument that the Champions League group stage had become quite stale and often boring and very often pretty predictable. The case for change was clear. But we’ve not even finished matchday one of the new-look tournament and it’s already obvious – if it wasn’t before – that they’ve taken something a bit meh and made it far, far worse.

First there’s the sheer number of games. The old 32-team Champions League group stage required 96 matches across six matchdays to determine a last 16, with eight further teams cast off into the Europa League.

The new format takes 144 matches across eight matchdays to reduce 36 teams to 24. It’s just so miserably lacking in competitive edge.

The correct decision to remove the Europa League safety net has been completely undone by instead just building in a Champions League safety net. Those eight teams don’t go to the Europa any more – instead they get another chance in the big competition. Got to minimise any and all risk of any big teams and their delicious revenue-generating capabilities being eliminated early, haven’t we?

Again, this isn’t the endgame of what happens when you design a sporting tournament based primarily on financial rather than sporting considerations, but it’s a considerable step down that road.

A lot of attention has obviously been given to the fact you don’t have everybody playing everybody in any individual section now, but that’s not itself a major problem. Everyone has eight fixtures against a wide variety of teams; there is sporting fairness there. Sure, some teams’ fixture lists will be easier than others, but the luck of the draw was a part of the old Champions League and every other example of tournament football or indeed sport ever devised. That’s not a problem.

What is a problem is how little any of these matches individually now mean. In one giant table there is no instant context for any individual result, and that’s exacerbated further by the fact that, unlike a traditional league, there is no great significance in your finishing position except in a couple of very specific places where it suddenly matters enormously.

Which teams are going to find themselves on the bubbles around eighth place (for direct entry into the last 16) and 24th (for qualification to the play-off round) will not become clear for several rounds. And by that time we’ll also have a pretty clear idea of which handful teams are already pretty much guaranteed a top-eight spot, which morass of teams are pretty much guaranteed a top-24 finish, and which glut of strugglers are unlikely to make it.

The halfway-valid sporting argument against a straight top-16 qualification is that it would lead to too many dead rubbers in the second half of the group stage. The counters to that are that really that’s just evidence of having designed a bad format from the start anyway, but also that a few dead rubbers is actually infinitely preferable to removing almost all the jeopardy from all but a tiny handful of the remaining games.

If the top 16 went straight through to a seeded last 16 based on finishing positions, there would at least be a significant incentive to finish as high as possible in the table as well as to sneak into that top 16 at the lower end. You give more teams more to actually fight for and for longer, while also removing the artificial significance that currently exists around that eighth-place finish.

With 24 teams making it through – eight directly, 16 into a play-off round – you create a bizarre scenario where the difference between finishing first and eighth or between ninth and 24 is far smaller than the difference between finishing eighth and ninth or between 24th and 25th. There’s no logic to that.

City and Inter’s 0-0 draw will likely mean nothing whatsoever as the stagger unwinds. The old group stage was wildly imperfect, but we would at least be able to point to that result and see how it hurt City’s chances of top spot while boosting Inter’s. We’d know something.

Celtic’s thumping 5-1 win over Slovan Bratislava would, in a regular group stage, be a potentially group-upending result. It would – at the very, very, very least – leave Celtic well placed for third. It would mean something. It might still. But it also might very well be a first-night clash between two teams destined to finish in that bottom 12. Obviously we never know how anything is going to pan out after one match of any tournament, but you might reasonably expect it to provide some kind of clues

Celtic will still enjoy that win, of course they will, but it’s not right – or fair – that it means so little in a wider context. Aston Villa returning to Europe’s biggest competition and winning their first game 3-0 away from home should feel huge, not in all likelihood pretty meaningless for a team that has probably done nothing other than cement its already mighty strong chances of finishing somewhere between ninth and 24th.

But the absence of context and meaning is only a corollary of the really big problem: the jeopardy. Or more accurately its near total absence. It is an absolutely vital component to any sport. Perhaps the vital component. Without jeopardy, without context, any sporting event becomes just entertainment.

And it’s not just that suits don’t understand the importance of this, it’s that they actively want to eliminate it.

The likelihood is that teams will need around nine points to be in the top 24. Might be a point lower or higher, but it’s likely to be around that. It means a team could lose its first five Champions League games and not be eliminated. Sure, you’re reducing those dead rubbers but you’re losing all the sporting edge along the way to do so.

On the flipside, those who win their opening games might now be looking at needing only six or seven points from their remaining seven games to qualify for the knockout stage.

The old Champions League group stage had grown long and dull and too devoid of drama. UEFA have – deliberately – ripped that up and devised a new one that is longer, duller and with even less emotion and excitement.

And these obvious flaws are already playing out on matchday one. The opening night saw five wins out of five for the bookies’ favourites. The second night saw one favourite held to a draw, but with almost no significance for their season-long ambitions. None of it means a thing at this point, and almost none of it will in the final reckoning either.

Click here to read article