We'll always have Paris
UEFA may have expanded the Champions League for the usual (wrong) reasons, but it did manage to add a boatload of drama to the early rounds
It is a general rule that when a sports organization decides to expand, they end up with more of a lesser product.
North American leagues have been particularly committed to the bit, adding playoff spots and rounds to chase ever-increasing television deals, while at the same time diluting the importance of the many dozens of regular-season games that come before that point.
And so, when UEFA announced plans to expand and reform the Champions League, the competition that pits Europe’s best club football teams against one another in a competition that runs parallel to their domestic leagues, skepticism was properly warranted. Reformed in 1992 out of what was then called the European Cup, the Champions League has routinely provided thrilling moments, and often the highest level of football anywhere. (The World Cup has teams with higher levels of talent, but international squads don’t play together enough to develop the cohesion and control of a dominant club team.)
Why mess with that? Money, obviously.
A format that previously had eight four-team groups in the Group Stage, with two from each advancing to the knockout rounds after round-robin play, has been changed to a single 36-team “league” in which each team plays eight games against eight different opponents. The top eight teams would advance to the knockouts, the bottom eight would go home, and the middle 16 would be paired up to compete for the final eight spots in the Round of 16.
More teams, more games, more cash from tickets and broadcast rights. UEFA couldn’t help themselves, even as clubs and players have been saying for years that the football calendar is already far too jammed. The Champions League wasn’t broken, but they fixed it anyway.
And damned if it didn’t work out.
The seventh round of the League Phase was completed this week, and it was properly chaotic. Barcelona went down 3-1 early to Benfica in Lisbon on Tuesday, and ended up scoring three late goals to win 5-4. One of the Barcelona goals came when the Benfica goalkeeper booted the ball long, only for it to bounce off the face of a Barcelona player more than 20 yards away and sail back over his head into his net. I mean, look at this:
That’s the good stuff, right there.
That game was outdone on Wednesday in Paris, where PSG went down 2-0 to Manchester City thanks to two second-half goals from the visitors, then roared back to score four of their own. It was madness. Amid an absolute deluge of rain, the team that has been the most dominant club in Europe over the past several years, winning four Premier League titles and a Champions League, looked bewildered and bedraggled by the PSG onslaught.
After seven rounds, the league table is also bewildering. There are some expected powers at the top — Liverpool, Barcelona, Inter — but German giants Bayern Munich, after a 3-0 pasting by Dutch club Feyenoord on Wednesday, are down in 15th. Real Madrid, which has won the Champions League six times in the past decade, are a spot back in 16th. The small French club of Brest, which can’t play its home matches in its stadium because it is too small for Champions League standards, is up in 13th. And Manchester City is way down in 25th, needing a win in the last round next week just to get out of the league phase. Again: madness!
As it’s just the first year of this format, it’s hard to know what has happened here. In the old system, the big clubs like Madrid, Bayern and City generally cruised through the group stage. Each team played home-and-home against three opponents, and the heavyweights were generally much better than at least two of those opponents. There were almost always some easy wins in there, even if the odd upset happened. This year, it’s almost like some of the European powers didn’t realize the league phase wouldn’t be a cakewalk until it was more than half over. Real Madrid lost four out of its first five matches — including to relative welterweights Stuttgart and Lille — before winning its last two to dig itself out of a hole. Man City won two matches against eastern European minnows by a combined score of 9-0 in October, but hasn’t won a Champions League match since.
But while all of that sets up a fascinating league-phase finale next week, with all games taking place at the same time on Wednesday, it may still blow up in UEFA’s face. The chief suits no doubt imagined a league phase where the traditional powers would be bunched at the top, with the next tier of clubs battling it out in the playoff round — the teams that finish ninth to 24th — for the chance to meet them in the final 16. But as anyone who follows club football would know, eight games isn’t enough to establish an accurate league table. And so whatever happens next week, the Champions League standings will include some oddities. That means a team like Liverpool could finish the league phase on top and still end up playing a City or Bayern — the kind of club it might have expected to meet in the final — in its first knockout games, because those teams are only likely to scrape in among the lower seeds now. UEFA wouldn’t be keen to have Liverpool-Bayern or Barcelona-City take place in the round of 16. But, best laid plans, et cetera.
That is a problem for next month, though. And maybe next year if they decide that the format produced some less-than-ideal results. For now, there is next Wednesday’s league-wide shootout. It promises to be, as they say, a cracker.