Hate the new Champions League format? Embrace change and, er, be open to new ideas | Champions League

A A few weeks ago I was eating the neighbor’s cat (it’s okay, I’m an immigrant) when I saw something even more repulsive – the Uefa Champions League’s X (Twitter) video titled The dawn of a new era. The 30-second clip was an attempt to softly launch the European Cup format that starts next week.

They’ve hired a good group of ex-pros: Luis Figo, Gianluigi Buffon, Robbie Keane (who has presumably supported the new 36-team system since he was a little boy) look bewildered. The highlight is Zlatan Ibrahimovic, ready to conduct an orchestra. “Who wrote this?” he asks. UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin enters in impossibly shiny boots. “I did,” he says, arms outstretched, before folding them and smiling.

Why is he front and center in this ad? It’s true that some – not all – younger fans support the player over the team, but is there a corner of the internet I’ve yet to explore where people only want to see football’s greatest executives in shiny, tapered suits? Who wore it best? Gianni or Aleksander?

It’s healthy to be sceptical about the people who run football: their track record over the years hasn’t been great. And now Ceferin wants to write the theme tune and sing the theme tune. Maybe he’ll decide to stay for another cycle (or two).

As a human being I am open to new ideas, but as a football fan I naturally hate change. So I was not disappointed when I came to the conclusion that this terrible advert made the whole format a disaster, before a single ball had been kicked.

And there are reasons to be concerned. More games in an already bloated schedule – player welfare, football’s growing carbon footprint. A sweetener for the big clubs in an attempt to fend off the European Super League. No guarantees of the promised fewer dead rubbers. A competition where you don’t play everyone. A league table with 36 teams – whose screen is big enough for that?

I found myself becoming a kind of Champions League group stage ultra, despite being at best indifferent to it for the past 20 years. Like all football, it was sometimes good, sometimes dull.

I had closed my mind. Luckily, Guardian Football Weekly contributor Mark Langdon of the Racing Post was there to pry it open again.

It is more interesting to play against eight teams instead of three. Fans get more fun away games. Teams play against two opponents from the same seeded pot, which means more “big” games, but also more games to win for the smaller teams. Many teams that are in the spotlight may only make it to the play-off round, which can make it quite exciting.

Before this coercive intervention, my reaction was the perfect example of the generational conflict that all fans experience. We find every new development to be in conflict with the game we fell in love with when we were 10 years old – proud to tell those younger than us that those were the best years, simpler times. But at the same time, we roll our eyes at those who came before us and claim that football was better before we fell in love with it.

It’s clearly an oversimplification, but fans who want to embrace nostalgia without completely rejecting everything new may find themselves in an uncomfortable no-man’s land between the dinosaurs and the hipsters. It’s a musical waiting to happen. Richard Keys and Andy Gray stomp around the stage laughing at xG while Opta Joe tries to fend them off with an iPad, some analysis and a couple of very long Athletic articles.

From a broadcaster’s perspective, a healthy skepticism of new things is a good thing. You have to be true to yourself, but also remember that you have a vested interest in being around for the next 30 years or so. Moving with the times is important. XG took me a while – it’s obviously not perfect, but it can be useful.

In a particularly dry moment, while looking ahead to this weekend’s games, I was drawn to a statistic from Jérémy Doku about “ball carries” – a phrase that doesn’t roll off the tongue all that easily. The BBC Sport website tells me that the Belgian winger “has carried the ball 747.8 metres on ball carries in the Premier League this season, almost 300m more than any other player”. Brighton’s Jan Paul van Hecke is second on 457.3m.

Is this interesting? Probably. He runs with the ball considerably more than anyone else. What does this mean? He is good at dribbling. It is easier to do when you play for Man City. It is perhaps notable that he has the license from Pep Guardiola to do it considerably more than any of his team-mates. And yet there is a sense that perhaps football does not need someone to count how many metres Jan Paul van Hecke advances with the ball each game.

It’s not a conclusion that will go viral, but the reality is that different people want different things from the game. Admire Van Hecke’s ball carries or not. Both are fine. And it’s perfectly acceptable to view your vintage through rose-colored glasses.

Interestingly enough, when it comes to the Champions League, there is a small group of us born in the late 70s/early 80s whose first years of learning the game coincided with the European ban on English clubs. The European Cup didn’t even exist. You didn’t see it, Saint and Greavesie didn’t talk about it. It didn’t exist. If anyone is open-minded about next week, it’s us. Time to open my mind, even if I want the players to overshadow the suits when the games start, however controversial that may be.