February 5 – Following months of conjecture, football leagues across the Continent were holding crucial talks virtually today on a new-look Champions League from 2024 that will radically reshape the tournament.
UEFA is preparing a significant overhaul of its flagship competition, tweaking the group stage which often results in “dead” matches and replacing it with a format in which 36 clubs would play 10 different opponents and qualification would come from one single league table.
The top eight clubs would qualify automatically for the round of 16 with the next 16 teams potentially contesting a playoff to fill the other slots in the knockout phase.
UEFA believes the so-called Swiss model would generate greater revenues as it would produce 180 group-stage games to sell to broadcasters instead of 96, as well as enhance fan interest.
“I think it is a great system because it is scalable. The number of games you play in the early stages can be a non pre-determined number of games,” European Club Association chief Andrea Agnelli, the president of Juventus, said last week.
Crucially the reforms are designed to stave off counter-plans to launch a largely closed breakaway European Super League.
Those meeting under the European Leagues umbrella will want to make sure the new system does not adversely affect their domestic games, not least the floated idea of playing Champions League fixtures at the weekend.
The European Leagues also want a guarantee that access to competitions will continue to be based on domestic league positions rather than historical criteria.
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