New Champions League format is a disaster.
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Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain could be eliminated from the Champions League tomorrow night. Thank goodness for the new tournament format, or so the experts say. Yes, it's the joy most football fans feel when two of Europe's oil-rich superclubs are in trouble. But experts also see Manchester City's misfortune as justification for a change to the Champions League. Finally, the end of the "boring party we've known for years," says pundit Jamie Carragher. It's easy to get caught up in the noise and even easier to forget about the big tournaments of recent seasons. However, officials at UEFA – the governing body of European football – decided that the tournament needed "more suspense" and "more fun". So they turned the group stage into a mini-league by adding extra matches and then adding a qualifying round. This is the "Swiss model", which was originally developed to organize chess tournaments in Zurich in the 1890s. There were too many players to compete in a round-robin tournament, so they faced random opponents of varying levels. This allowed the competitors to create a final ranking, but reduced the total number of games. UEFA has neglected this part. It did not want to increase the number of teams, but only the number of matches. The extra matches for each club mean 52 extra TV events for UEFA, increasing the prize money by almost 25% to around £2.2 billion.
The clubs are happy with the extra TV revenue. UEFA is at the service of the bigger and more recalcitrant clubs, who threaten to form a separate "Super League" whenever they fail to get their way. The new format transforms the group stage into a championship where each team plays eight others, eliminating the suspension of major matches. Did it matter if Barcelona lost a game against Monaco? It took them seven more games to catch up and they are now comfortably in second place. Of the 36 teams in the competition, half have already qualified for the next stage of the tournament, more than in this stage under the old system.
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The old group stage was simple and emphasised the gladiatorial atmosphere of the tournament. Ultimately, the Champions League is the pinnacle of club football and is supposed to pit Europe's clubs against each other to determine who will prevail. Four teams play in the group stage, once home and once away, and their final standings determine their fate - just like the World Cup. The top two teams advance to the knockout stage, the third-placed team is relegated to a lower tier of European competition - their frustrated fans were forced to travel to Azerbaijan instead of Spain - and the bottom team is eliminated. Playing a balanced number of home games can give smaller clubs an advantage and in recent years, just as many, if not more, have beaten their bigger opponents in the group stage. Manchester United were eliminated by Copenhagen, Atletico Madrid by Club Brugge and Inter Milan by Mönchengladbach. What happens to the fans? Take Aston Villa as an example. When their fans sat down to follow Villa's run in the Champions League, they had to navigate a winding list: away to Young Boys in Switzerland, followed by Munich and Bologna at home, Bruges away, then Juventus at home, Leipzig and Monaco. away. and, finally, Celtic at home. In the end, Villa finished in ninth place, or so they hoped. Their reward? Another round of qualifying matches against, uh, one of the teams they've probably faced before. Also, this time it will be a home and away game, and if Villa win overall, they could progress to the knockout stages, where the tournament really begins.
Compare that to Aston Villa's last appearance in the Champions League in 1982. Villa had won the tournament the previous year, so fans went in with high expectations. They first faced Besiktas of Turkey home and away, losing to progress and doing the same in Bucharest. But in the quarterfinals they narrowly lost to a strong Juventus team. It was over. Curtains. Six matches, all with high stakes. Now it takes 144 matches to eliminate just 12 teams from the tournament. There are four months of matches left to play.
The "Swiss model" is not helping Swiss teams, who continue to be destroyed every week and eliminated from the competition by their mediocre Central European neighbours. The last time a foreign team made serious progress in the Champions League was 13 years ago - APOEL of Cyprus qualified for the quarter-finals. The new format has not made the tournament more competitive, it has only served to squeeze more money out of an already saturated game.
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