We’re midway through Year 2 of the revamped UEFA Champions League, and already we’ve witnessed the dramatic impact of the 2024 switch to a 36-team, Swiss-model league phase unlike anything seen in Europe before.
To take one example, the final matchday of the league phase this year featured Benfica goalkeeper Anatoliy Trubin delivering an iconic moment, as he scored a 98th-minute header against Real Madrid to stave off elimination and push the Portuguese club in the knockout rounds. On the flip side, the competition’s format is now so confusing that Trubin himself didn’t know how vital his goal was for Benfica’s Champions League hopes.
It’s clear that there’s no perfect solution, but that doesn’t mean we can’t try! With the knockout playoff round taking place Tuesday and Wednesday, we decided to ask our writers: How would you fix the Champions League format, within the bounds of what might be possible?
Here are three fascinating proposals from Mark Ogden, Gabriele Marcotti and Bill Connelly, ranging from innovative to subtly effective.
Two mini-leagues, one gigantic playoff round
UEFA has introduced several iterations of the Champions League since overhauling the old European Cup format in the early-1990s. Despite the tweaks and changes, the competition is still the pinnacle of club football, and they haven’t managed to break it just yet.
But the knockout stages are where the magic happens. That’s part of the problem UEFA must overcome, because no matter how many times they reboot the group stages, those early rounds will never have the jeopardy and excitement of classic two-leg, winner-take-all encounters.
The only reason Matchday 8 of the league phase was so enthralling was because it had a knockout feel to it, with Benfica’s 4-2 win against Real Madrid — courtesy of goalkeeper Trubin’s stoppage-time goal — as good as any knockout tie.
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With all that in mind, how do you fix the format to inject some sense of vibrancy to the group/league stage? We are never going back to straight knockouts from the first round — there’s too much risk and not enough guaranteed money for the top clubs to ever sanction that — so there has to be some form of group stage.
So why not split the league phase in two and have two leagues feeding into the knockout stages, in a similar fashion to the AFC and NFC feeding into the NFL playoffs? Instead of a bloated 36-team league, make it two 18-team sections with only the top two in each guaranteed a round of 16 spot. The remaining 24 — 12 in each section — would go into a supersize playoff round — with an open draw!
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Leboeuf: Benfica’s goalkeeper scoring was a Champions League miracle
Jürgen Klinsmann and Frank Leboeuf react to Anatoliy Trubin’s last minute goal to send Benfica to the Champions League playoffs.
Let’s ensure that only the best teams have an advantage, so if you finish outside the top two, you could face anyone in the playoff. You could end up playing Real Madrid or Bodo/Glimt, but it would be down to the luck of the draw rather than a position-based seeding. And all teams would still play eight league phase games, so there would be no reduction in match revenue
It still wouldn’t be an ideal format. Too many teams would still be able to qualify with a mediocre league phase, and you could argue there would be just as many relatively meaningless games, but I want Arsenal vs. PSG or Real Madrid vs. Bayern Munich in November to matter more than they do right now. Having only two automatic spots available would sharpen the tension at the top, and what we all want to see is the big guns playing as though they mean it. — Mark Ogden
Clubs get to pick their opponents
We’re asked to be realistic here, so bear that in mind. We’re not going to back to the one league/one team days, and we’re not going back to purely straight knockouts. (Besides, we effectively have a separate straight knockout tournament after the group stage anyway.)
I don’t think there’s much wrong with the current format, but rather, the main problem is with the seeding. Namely, that it’s not particularly meaningful!
Last year, Liverpool topped the group stage, and their “reward” for doing so was a showdown with Paris Saint-Germain, who finished 15th (and knocked the Reds out). Then there was Real Madrid, who finished 11th and ended up playing Manchester City (22nd). Sure, both teams underachieved, but that was “punishment” for both. Had Real Madrid finished just one place lower, they would have faced — no disrespect — Celtic. Who would you rather play?
When we rank teams in the group stage by single points (or, worse, goal difference), it’s not exactly a scientific assessment of their relative strength. So let’s make the seedings mean something: Let clubs pick their opponents.
How would it work? Real Madrid finished ninth, making them the top-ranked team in the knockout round playoffs. Instead of being forced to play the 24th team (Benfica), they can choose any playoff team. Next up, Internazionale in 10th … they too can pick their poison.
Maybe Real Madrid don’t want to see Jose Mourinho again so soon after the fact. Maybe Inter, who are matched up with Bodo/Glimt, don’t want to travel north of the Arctic Circle to play on a plastic pitch in February. Whatever the reason, it would give a club a meaningful reward for finishing higher, in addition to creating a TV event: imagine giving a representative from each team 60 seconds “on the clock” to pick their opponent. Plus, it would naturally ensure the bigger, better teams are kept apart for as long as possible.
Then you’d repeat this in the round of 16: Arsenal get first pick, followed by Bayern Munich, and so on. While we’re at it, let the higher-ranked team decide if they want to play home or away first. We assume playing at home second is an advantage, but maybe some would rather not, whether due to fixture congestion or style of play or some other reason. Heck, let them decide if they want to play Tuesday or Wednesday, too.
These “sporting advantages” are things you can earn on the pitch and are actually meaningful. They make it less likely that late in the group stage, clubs are going to mail it in or settle for a draw, once they know they’re not making top eight. — Gabriele Marcotti
Actually, the new format is … mostly fine, but let’s make the seeding more concrete
Honestly, I think the biggest change we can make is one of mindset. A giant, eight-match league phase offers minimal jeopardy, yes, but that created some of the best stories of this season. With eight matches, both Benfica and Bodo/Glimt were able to weather some early setbacks and play their way into the competition. Hell, Pafos and Union Saint-Gilloise nearly did the same. They played better as they got their footing, and that lack of jeopardy actually benefited us as viewers. Treating the league phase as a true season — albeit a small one — with time for twists and turns and late surprises makes this format awfully fun, even if we know no one’s going to be eliminated in October.
If we’re insisting on making changes, however, I have a couple of small ones.
First, for the countries that provide four or more competitors, I would allow for at least one match against a domestic opponent in the league phase. If we’re going to live in a world in which the Premier League makes all of the money and can afford most of the best players, then it actually benefits them even further to not have to play each other. It certainly would have been trickier for Premier League teams to end up with five of the top eight spots in the table if, say, Chelsea had faced a trip to Arsenal, or Manchester City had to play its bogey team (Tottenham Hotspur). And hey, if we end up with a random extra El Clasico or Der Klassiker dropped into the November slate, who would complain?
Meanwhile, though there are plenty of Americanized touches getting proposed, I would actually go even further in one specific area. Forget getting rid of seeding — I’d hard-seed everything!
There’s a potentially huge difference between drawing, say, seventh-place Sporting CP (currently 16th in Opta’s power rankings) and eighth-place Manchester City (second) this year, or 17th-place Borussia Dortmund (19th) and 18th-place Olympiacos (45th). Last year, there was an immense difference in top-seeded Liverpool drawing 15th-place PSG instead of 16th-place Benfica, or 21st-place Celtic instead of 22nd-place Man City. There’s already quite a bit of randomness baked into how the final table looks — we don’t need one last burst of it with the draw. Let the table drive everything: In the round of 16, the first-place teams plays the winner of No. 16 and No. 17, No. 2 plays the winner of No. 15 and No. 18, et cetera.
Those aren’t huge changes because, honestly, I don’t think much needs changing. We play a mini-season long enough to have serious plot twists and evolutions, we have a couple of wild matchdays at the end of the league phase, then we have a giant bracket leading us through a few months of action. The competition’s expansion was driven almost entirely by the endless quest for more money, but as tends to happen in this sport, the craven pursuit of cash has given us more fun soccer to watch. — Bill Connelly