Yahoo Sport 
New-look Champions League is a pointless waste of time that will destroy the drama
After being eliminated by Real Madrid in the Champions League quarter-final in 2018, Juventus took decisive action. What was needed, they decided, was a guarantee of goals who could transform their two defeats in finals in the previous three years into gold. So they bought Cristiano Ronaldo for €100m, paying him more than the next four highest-paid players at the club put together, even though he was 33 and even though his individualistic immobility made him anachronistic at elite level.
Given the choice between structural reform that might have tackled the recurring problems and signing big names, of course, executives almost always plump for the latter. It’s glamorous, makes them feel important and doesn’t require any real work or understanding of football. And it will have a far greater short-term impact on social media eyeballs than overhauling the data analysis department, or improving scouting or recruitment, or any of the other vital unseen aspects of infrastructure.
Related: Fans across Europe speak out against Champions League expansion
Since when Juve have gone out of the Champions League to Ajax (annual revenue 39% of Juve’s), Lyon (45%) and, on Tuesday, Porto (22%).
At the same time, they have got rid of the manager who had won five league titles in a row and taken them to those two Champions League finals and, after a flirtation with a grumpy, cigarette-chewing ideologue, perhaps the least likely person in world football to inspire respect from Ronaldo, are now coached by an urbane vintner who used to be a midfielder. The consequence is that, after nine years, Juve’s hold on the Serie A title looks to be coming to an end.
So naturally, the genius who has overseen this collapse, the Juventus chairman, Andrea Agnelli, is the executive who, as chairman of the European Clubs Association, is fronting the redesign of the Champions League (although there are plenty of other club owners lined up behind him). It may not be entirely surprising that he favours a format that will guarantee a flow of revenue to the already rich no matter how badly they are run.
Within the next few weeks, it seems likely to be confirmed that from 2024 the Champions League will adopt the so-called “Swiss system”, with the group stage replaced by a format by which 36 teams each play 10 games, determined by seedings, with the top eight going forward to a last 16 and the teams between ninth and 24th playing off for the other eight slots.
The potential for collusion, for mutually beneficial draws in the final weeks, is obvious
There will, in other words, be 180 games to eliminate 12 teams, four additional matches to squeeze into a calendar already so stretched that last season Liverpool even pre-Covid had to play two games in two days. A side that win their first four games are in effect through and can then field weakened teams.
The potential for collusion, for mutually beneficial draws in the final weeks, is obvious. This is not a format to encourage sporting integrity; it stems from the same content-generating mindset that lusts after big names with no apparent idea of how football works or what makes it special.
By the final week, there may still be a couple of issues to be resolved in terms of automatic progression to the knockouts or to squeak into the top 24, but even that is a best-case scenario (and, really, does the ECA believe the world will be gripped by the 23rd- to 26th-best teams in Europe battling it out? By Krasnodar and Club Brugge scrapping for the right to be eliminated by Atlético Madrid in a play-off?).
First used in a Zurich chess tournament over a century ago, the 'Swiss system' has rarely featured in elite sport - but that could change if Uefa agrees a radical shake-up of the Champions League group stages.
The new system would see 32 or 36 teams placed in one league, each playing 10 games against teams seeded in four different pots. The top 16 teams would then advance to the knockout stages.
The format is yet to be agreed and finalised, but it is thought that the teams ranked from 17th to 24th would drop into the Europa League. Positions in the table may also affect seeding for the last-16, with the top-ranked side playing the team in 16th place, and so on.
The group stage as it stands, clearly, is far from perfect. It’s boring and predictable and involves too many dead games. But that’s not an issue of the format; it’s an issue of resources and their distribution (in 2019, say, Barcelona received 50% more prize money than the other losing semi-finalist, Ajax), the fact that the super-clubs are so wealthy they dominate everybody even when dismally mismanaged – for all Barcelona’s crisis, they still have a decent chance of a domestic double.
To believe the solution is to have more pointless games that will only widen football’s financial disparities is like thinking the best way to mend a broken metatarsal is to stamp on it really hard. In the group stage this year, Real Madrid were at least put under some pressure by losing to Shakhtar and then drawing against Borussia Mönchengladbach. They still ended up topping the group, but with four games to put it right, there was doubt; with eight games, there would be little sense of danger at all.
The Swiss system insulates the elite and, vitally, generates content from which they can generate even more revenue and protect themselves even further against the consequences of dreadful decisions. We are told blithely that it works well in chess. Which may be true, but then rich chess players can’t go out and buy a load of queens off poorer chess players whom the system has structurally disadvantaged.
Juve’s defeat this week to Porto was an example of what high-level European football can be. There was quality and there was drama, brilliance and stupidity, joy and sorrow. Because it mattered. Because there was a sense of jeopardy. Because at the end, one team went through and one team went out. Contrast that to Juve’s futile away win at the end of the group stage to Barcelona: it may have been a clash of super-clubs, perhaps even the final meeting of Ronaldo and Lionel Messi on a football field, but three months later barely anybody can recall it.
These compromises, supposedly, are necessary to head off the threat of a super-league. Perhaps this grotesque chimera does that for a while. But to what end, and at what cost? It will generate meaningless football that exacerbate the fundamental problem of inequality within the game. At some point Uefa has to act for football and say this is a sport, not a content-producing revenue machine for the very rich.
Call their bluff. Let the super-clubs go. And with Agnelli at the helm, watch them fly.
