Today one of UEFA’s proposed changes to the Champions League has gone viral, and to say that this is a mess is an understatement. These proposals are so ridiculous that it is hard to believe that they are being taken seriously.
They are unwieldy, over-complicated … and not particularly alluring either.
The idea of expanding participation is a perfectly valid one, but the proposed way of doing it reeks. For starters, the expansion to the lucrative stages will be limited to four teams … that’s hardly great news.
It will smooth the path a little … but not enough.
People had hoped that the expansion to the Groups would be bigger … the proposal that would have made the most sense would have expanded it by 16 teams to 48 sides … but that looks dead in the water because, as usual, the big clubs want more glamourous ties that see lots of opportunities to get betting with 1xbet instead of allowing the smaller nations greater access to the top table.
Every club would have played ten Group games instead of six under that system … so there would, indeed, have been more money spread around. With a 48 team tournament we’d have seen some restoration of egalitarian principles.
Instead, the clubs are apparently backing a completely barmy proposal which will make a joke out of the premier club football competition in the world.
This bizarre, and frankly ludicrous, fudge would mean that the 36 teams which make up the big money stage will no longer be drawn in Groups. There won’t be any Champions League Groups to speak of.
Instead these teams will play ten games against randomised opponents in a “league” system, with five games at home and five games away.
And yes, these games would result in teams getting “points” and being ranked on some kind of league table with the top sixteen clubs qualifying for the next round, the eight below them going into the Europa and the eight below that going out … and you know what?
Just writing about it has made me lose the will to live.
Maybe it’s just being a Celtic fan at the moment but I have never been more disillusioned with the sport itself.
I have never been more fed up with the greed and the money-grubbing and the way certain clubs and nations lead the rest by the nose … watching Neil Lennon take press conferences and make excuses for the incompetence of his bosses only adds to the sense that it might be better if the global health crisis brought the whole thing crashing down.