The revolutionary new Champions League (Last Tango, opinion by Jorge Barraza)

You have to take a course to understand it: it is the new Champions League. It has nothing to do with the one we have known until now or with any other previous tournament, its format is revolutionary.

It is different from anything known, although it continues with FIFA’s trend of creating new tournaments and expanding existing ones with more teams and more matches. With so much activity, it will be difficult for anyone to establish a hegemony, whatever it is called…

An example: to face the seven competitions that it has to compete in this season, Madrid could end up playing 72 games. The year has 52 weeks, footballers enjoy 30 days of vacation, which leaves 48 weeks, a month of pre-season reduces them to 44, and the FIFA dates for playing in national teams take away another five weeks, leaving 39.

In that period, Madrid should play 72 games. As long as there is no World Cup or Euro Cup or Nations League. Or Copa America, in the case of South American footballers.The calendar is exploding, but UEFA and FIFA are constantly adding tournaments and matches. Obviously, this will help to share the successes. And the clubs that are looking for the big titles will have to have squads of at least 30 players. But playing with starters is not the same as playing with substitutes. This will inevitably affect the quality of the game.

It turns out that the television business is so fabulous that it has to be given more and more, like an insatiable lion to which one cutlet after another has to be thrown.

Is the change in format intended to end Real Madrid’s dominance?

The question that many are asking themselves is: will this new system be able to end Real Madrid’s monopoly? Is that what it was created for? Let’s not forget that UEFA’s main enemy is Florentino Pérez’s club, the almost exclusive promoter of the Super League, which was created to sink the European Union’s star competition. There is no doubt that the new system will make things difficult for Madrid: more confrontations, more difficult rivals.

What is the new competition system? Four more teams will be added, from 32 to 36. There will be 64 more matches, from 125 to 189. The groups disappear, each team plays against 8 different rivals, which were determined on Thursday by a machine.

All of them will be a single match, whether at home or away. For example: Madrid will face Borussia Dortmund, Milan, Salzburg and Stuttgart at the Bernabéu, while they will visit Liverpool, Atalanta, Lille and Brest.

The 36 teams are added together in a general table. The top eight go directly to the round of 16 and the bottom 12 are eliminated. The middle 16, who occupy positions 9th to 24th, go to the round of 32, a kind of play-off. The eight winners also advance to the round of 16 and from then on everything is the same as before, knockout.

The four pots of nine clubs each were ranked according to UEFA performance coefficient. Pot one contains the best teams, i.e. Real Madrid, Manchester City, Bayern Munich, PSG, Liverpool, Borussia Dortmund, Inter, Leipzig and Barcelona. They will all face two opponents from each pot. The new thing is that there was no draw or balls, the opponents were decided by a computer program.

The prizes were increased considerably (21%). The new Champions League will distribute 2.75 billion dollars among its 36 hosts. The champion, taking into account the prize for participating, the bonuses for results (2.33 million dollars for a victory), the home box office and the average obtained by television audience, could pocket around 220 million dollars.

The winner w
ill have to play 15 matches instead of 13, as in the last edition. But it could even be 17 if they have to go through the play-offs. Germany and Italy will be represented by five teams, having earned an additional place thanks to the good performance of their clubs last year.

England, Spain and France will have 4; Portugal, Holland and Austria, 2, while Scotland, Switzerland, Ukraine, Belgium, Croatia, Serbia, Slovakia and the Czech Republic will each have one.

UEFA’s strategy seems clear: enable more countries and distribute more money so that the cattle that could be attracted by the Super League are not dispersed.

However, Giorgio Marchetti, vice-president of the European body, denied this: “The change in the competition has nothing to do with the Super League. We have been studying it for a long time, since 2018. We consulted with the clubs and we believed that it was time to make a thorough reform.”

Florentino Perez, the Antichrist of UEFA, is totally against this radical reform, having already made this clear in a very harsh speech during the last Real Madrid members’ meeting: “The new Champions League is an absurd format, it makes no sense… UEFA is aiming for an unusual project, without two-legged matches and with more games. They are going in the opposite direction. That is not the solution. The rights to the 125 Champions League matches were currently sold in Spain for 360 million. For 2024, 189 matches have been sold for 320 million euros; 64 more matches and 40 million less.”

He continued with the hammer: “Football is suffering an unprecedented institutional crisis at all levels, both in Spain and in Europe. The situation is very serious. There are a number of managers who act without thinking about the fans. European football does not belong to the president of UEFA and Spanish football does not belong to the president of La Liga.”

He then emphasised the global business of sport: “Football clubs have been overtaken by American clubs in other sports. The top ten sports entities in the Forbes ranking are now teams in other sports. The Americans must be doing something very well and we must be doing something very wrong in Europe.”

Against his calm and sober style, Pérez launched all his artillery at UEFA: “This competition model will further alienate fans from our sport. The new UEFA model is not the one that fans around the world demand, but the one that best fits the UEFA governance system, a system from other times at the service of its managers. The demands of fans and players are not taken into account, nor are the needs of clubs. UEFA continues to manage the competitions in the same way as it did thirty years ago.”

Finally, he went after the Spanish League: “We have the obligation to offer fans around the world the best possible show and to reduce the cost of televised football. It makes no sense to charge 100 euros a month to watch televised football, 10% of the minimum wage. The strategy cannot be to charge more and more to fewer and fewer fans.”

It is an open and declared war between the most successful and powerful club in the world (also the most attractive in the Champions League) versus the rigid and also powerful UEFA. Super League versus Champions.

There will be more chapters. For now, Madrid is within the system. For now…

Last Tango…

Jorge Barraza

For THE TIME

@JorgeBarra
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