The Champions League: A New Era, or Just the Richest Winning in More Lucrative Ways? | Champions League

Oand again, with seeding. UEFA’s new Champions League group stage format is known as the “Swiss system,” and, to be fair, you can write your own jokes about that. It’s full of holes. It’s grossly irresponsible, and its inner workings are largely impenetrable to outsiders. It’s a convenient conduit for seizing and laundering the money of some of the world’s worst people. It’s a complex and morally questionable way to keep people asleep for long periods of time. Take your pick.

It is perhaps fitting that the first steps in this bold new era are being taken in Switzerland, with Young Boys v Aston Villa selected as the early kick-off on Tuesday, alongside Juventus v PSV. And of course, it is an emblematic choice for other reasons too. The Bernese club may be outsiders in the competition, having secured their place in a play-off against Galatasaray last month. But domestically they are an invincible force, having won their sixth Swiss title in the past seven years despite a season marked by internal strife and lacklustre route-one football.

How have they done it? In April, the Swiss Football League released the club’s latest financial figures, which showed that Young Boys have left the competition virtually dead. No one else comes close to them in terms of wages, revenue, assets, profits, league points. Their broadcasting revenue last season was roughly equal to that of all their Super League rivals put together.

And of course the vast majority of that income came from the Champions League, allowing Young Boys to invest in a competition where everyone else has to sell. This year’s competition should earn them a guaranteed £36m, more than the annual income of all but one of their Swiss Super League rivals and – by a happy coincidence – the planned cost of the new centre of excellence they are building on the outskirts of Bern.

Many of Europe’s mid-tier leagues have a similar story to tell. Shakhtar Donetsk have won six of the last seven titles in Ukraine, Red Star seven in a row in Serbia, Dinamo Zagreb seven in a row (and 18 of the last 19) in Croatia. Local factors may vary, but the common thread that ties all these chains of dominance together is the Champions League revenue, which even in modest amounts has the capacity to render domestic competition pointless.

And so it takes a very special kind of person to survey this landscape and decide that what the modern competition really needs is bigger windfalls. But this has always been the reasoning behind the expansion of the group stage, despite all the talk of “danger” and the glossy UEFA promotional videos in which Zlatan Ibrahimovic extols the new format because “the fans deserve more action”.

Meanwhile, you can well imagine the bewilderment in the corridors of Aston Villa at the backlash over their inflated Champions League ticket prices, given that a dedication to extorting as much money from fans, brands and broadcasters as possible is about the closest thing the competition has to a core set of values. What did you think this was about? Glory?

And while UEFA has promised that the competition will make more sense once it starts, in some ways the logic is clear enough: content for content’s sake, more games for the sake of more games, a structure built for the benefit of the continent’s biggest clubs and the investors who bankroll them. Eight games per team for the first time. Wimbledon-style knockout round seedings for the first time. Group stage matches in the new year for the first time since 2003, bringing not just the winter break but also the January transfer window into play.

Meanwhile, all this talk of danger probably needs a bit of context. While the old eight-group format required 96 games to eliminate 16 teams, this format requires 144 games to eliminate just 12 teams. A single 36-team ranking determines qualification for the knockout stages, with the top eight going straight through and positions nine-24 going to a two-game play-off.

What does this mean in practice? According to the website Football Meets Data, which has run 10,000 simulations of the group stage, 17 points pretty much guarantees you a place in the top eight. Nine or 10 points should earn you a play-off. And so one of the classic problems of the old group stage – dead rubbers – remains unresolved, with plenty of potential in the final few rounds for mismatches between teams still fighting and those already qualified or knocked out, and perhaps the temptation to rest a few players in anticipation of tougher challenges.

Add to that the fact that everyone has a different set of eight matches, and it’s clear that the new format is a continuation of a wider UEFA process of gradually replacing sporting integrity with the manufactured excitement of the TV game show. After all, if your goal was simply to find the best team in Europe, you’d have a round-robin competition where everyone plays everyone else. If, on the other hand, your goal was to maximise the danger and make every match count, you’d simply have a straight knockout (as was the case until 1991).

But UEFA wants neither. Instead, you have a process that is essentially reversed from the desired outcome: the best teams play each other from the start, but not to the point of knocking each other out, because you want them to still be playing each other at the end. The pointlessness, the lack of context, the confusion over whether, say, Liverpool v Real Madrid on 27 November even matters: this is not a glitch or a design flaw, it is deliberate, baked into the design.

And so the really striking part of the new format isn’t how much has changed, but how little. Last season, the Opta supercomputer predicted there was a 79% chance that the winner would come from one of the top eight clubs in the competition. This season, that figure is 80%. Manchester City had a 99% chance of reaching the last 16 last year and now have a 95% chance. The knockout stages are a new consolation prize for the giants after two consecutive seasons in which there were clearly stronger and weaker halves of the draw, with underdog finalists like Borussia Dortmund and Inter.

That these two former winners can be described in such terms at all is a measure of how quickly the field has shrunk. But amid the newness and reshuffling, a familiar pyramid of favourites has re-emerged: City and Real Madrid sit clearly at the top, followed by about half a dozen outside challengers in Bayern Munich, Paris Saint-Germain, Barcelona, ​​Liverpool, Arsenal and Inter.

Not Bayer Leverkusen? Probably not, even if their draw is favourable and the new format gives Xabi Alonso’s squad a bit more time to get used to the competition. The same can be said of Girona, Atalanta and Stuttgart, last season’s revelations who will surely have a tougher time this time around. Villa have had some delicious games and should be able to secure a play-off spot. Celtic, meanwhile, have one of the most favourable draws on paper, but will have to find a balance between adventure and caution.

At what point is it worth considering what success would feel like for the new competition. More excitement? More surprises? Fewer dead matches? Higher viewing figures? Someone finally getting the point of Benfica? Or does it just feel like success any other year: a confirmation of existing financial realities, with the richest clubs simply triumphing in more complicated and lucrative ways?

Because amid the new dawns and new rules, there is of course a familiar endgame in sight, one in which the biggest clubs simply decide to make even more concessions next time around. If a group stage can consist of eight games, why not 10 or 12 in the future? There are still plenty of free midweeks in the calendar to cannibalise. Italy and Germany may have earned the two extra slots this season, but why not just give England and Spain extra slots? And how long before the powers that be decide that Manchester United and Chelsea – however competitively inept – simply have to sit in this thing for the eyes?

Football fans are naturally conservative animals, bound by rituals and seasonal routines, naturally wary of change. The instinctive reaction to any innovation is to think of all the ways it could fail, and from confusion to boredom to dishonesty, there is no shortage of contenders in that regard. But this is not actually the worst-case scenario. If you are worried about what happens if the new Champions League fails, consider what happens if it actually succeeds.