It feels like everyone wants to ruin the Champions League. UEFA, the clubs and television executives all seem hellbent on fixing something that isn’t really broken. For starters, no one wants a European Super League apart from glory hunting fanboys who probably don’t even watch games to begin with.
However, the new Champions League format proposed by the European Clubs Association is somehow worse. As reported by The Guardian, UEFA will likely approve plans for an expanded Champions League that has 36 teams. Those clubs would play 10 group matches in a “Swiss system” that sees them all ranked in a single league table.
What the fuck is a Swiss system? I’m sure it was the question you all were asking or about to ask anyway. Here is the best explanation I could find (and it came from Wikipedia which is never a good sign):
Competitors meet one-on-one in each round and are paired using a set of rules designed to ensure that each competitor plays opponents with a similar running score, but does not play the same opponent more than once. The winner is the competitor with the highest aggregate points earned in all rounds. All competitors play in each round unless there is an odd number of them.
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The new Champions League format is lame
Want to know what other sports use the Swiss system? Badminton, chess, curling, Magic: the Gathering and Scrabble are some of the most notable practitioners. That is hardly a ringing endorsement.
“I think we’re very close to my ideal Champions League, I think the Swiss system is beautiful,” he said. “I think it will provide great opportunities for those teams participating in that competition. It will provide the knockouts that are the essence of any competition. It’s very, very close to an ideal Champions League,” Andrea Agnelli, the chairman of the European Clubs Association, explained.
Beautiful? Are you serious? How are those badminton TV ratings doing? I’m sure we can all remember those memorable Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game tournaments settled by the Swiss system.
This is so lame that it just makes me want to yell into a pillow. Give us the superfluous second group stage again or unbearable 0-0 all-Serie A Champions League Finals before you make the public suffer through this nonsense. Literally no one is asking for this.
It is even worse than when UEFA forced the Europa League upon the world. Look, the UEFA Cup wasn’t particularly interesting, but it wasn’t bad either. Then some geniuses thought it would be a good idea to transform the competition into a poor man’s Champions League. Now fewer people care about it now than ever before.
Who is this change for?
The biggest problem UEFA, and soccer in general, have is a complete disregard for fans. The people who attend games and watch them on television are of no importance to the sport’s leadership whatsoever. They just continue to chase people who will probably never become fans in the first place.
And if clubs think that this new format will bring in more money for some reason, they are gravely mistaken. Perhaps they can get some additional cash in that first television contract because of the extra games, but this looks like a ratings killer. It will be back to the drawing board after that.
As an American who became a fan of soccer in his early 20s, I was drawn to the Champions League because it was so different and striking. Watching domestic leagues was great, but you knew European nights were a completely different animal.
And yet here we are with a proposed new Champions League format that seems to have been created for no one. True fans of the sport don’t want it. Casual followers aren’t sticking around for an explanation of the ridiculous Swiss system. And people who don’t care about soccer now won’t care about it in the future.
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