UEFA Champions League changes upon us

Liam Carter, Staff Writer

UEFA adopted a new 36-team format for the champions league meaning each competing team will play 8 games over 10 weeks in a 36-league table system in which the top 8 teams will automatically advance to the knockout stages. Clubs finishing between 9th and 24th qualify for the playoff places which upon playing would then create a round of 16 brackets for the tournament and the knockout stages would then proceed as normal.

A 36-team champions league under this format would mean that teams would all play an extra 4 games, meaning that the top clubs would play each other more often.

In my opinion, this is a negative change to the tournament because of the already busy and ever-changing match schedule for those elite clubs. This caused concern within the premier league and when Juventus Chairman Andrea Agnelli was asked about it he said that he believes that 20 teams are too many for the premier league and that they may have to reduce its number of clubs to help combat players having to play too many games  I understand that increasing the number of fixtures between the top-tier European clubs will attract a bigger TV audience and allow them to grow in popularity for the competition thus creating sponsorship deals that are on a larger scale for the competing clubs however with these additional games. However, I personally feel that the key sporting values are being neglected with this change to the structure of the competition because what stops UEFA from asking for more games to played in this format in future seasons?

This new structure for the competition creates an additional 4 champions league places which will be added:

One place in League un

One place in the Eredivisie league

2 other places will be offered to “Underperforming clubs” This is something that is based on that club’s performance over the previous 5 seasons. I feel that this is anti-competitive and looking back this change reminds me of the plans for the top European clubs to create a breakaway super league.

Of course, there is the argument that this has benefited the Eredivisie Prior to this change, the Dutch league (Eredivisie) did not have an automatic champion’s league qualification place. The reason behind this is that the league was not high enough on the UEFA coefficient list making it ineligible to hold the rights to automatic qualification positions, the addition of this will allow them to league and grow their audience within Europe.

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This list shows presents the data consisting of the number of points accumulated across the total number of clubs that represents an association in that current season’s club competitions.

 I feel that the sporting values of fair play were neglected here because this list is only used to determine 2/4 of these additional places. I also think that it is unethical towards players because of the potential risk of injury due to an increased number of games per season.