WHY SAY ANYTHING?

The Champion’s league started life as the European Cup back in 1955. It was originally intended to be a competition featuring the champions of the major European football leagues and ran, in this format, for 37 years.

As a tournament it was very successful and also very simple. Ties were played over two legs, home and away, and the winners progressed to the next round. Nothing too complicated there then. To be in it a team either had to win it or win their domestic league.

Unfortunately, not only was this not complicated enough for UEFA, it also didn’t generate enough money so, in 1992, the Champion’s League was born.

This birth heralded the addition of multiple teams from the same country being allowed to enter and, by definition, totally contradicted the new name of the competition. It became a tournament where teams in certain countries could dilute their own ambition and just aim for a top three or four finish in order to qualify for the new “Champion’s” League.

Changing the format so that non-title winning teams outnumbered the title winners was not the only alteration made to the set-up.

A league system was also introduced so that the competition started with teams split into groups within which they had to attain top two status to progress to the knock-out rounds which followed.

Consequently the European Cup, as we knew it, morphed into the biggest and most important club competition in Europe.

The problem we have with it is quite simple. It is neither a competition solely for champions, nor is it a true league. So, rather than a name change, we suggest making it a real league and dropping the knock-out side of it altogether.

The Champion’s League should consist of some of the winners of the major leagues around Europe. This is something upon which most people would agree. If that were the case there would then be 26 countries vying for inclusion in the tournament.

These are as follows:

Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, England, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Kazakhstan, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Scotland, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Romania, Ukraine, and Serbia. In addition to these there is an associate league which represents Turkey.

Now, the top twelve seeded teams would form the Champion’s League in it’s first year of the new order. The other fourteen teams would go into the Europa League. Then, the games would be played midweek, as normal. At the end of the “European season” only the winners of the competition, in the same way as is the case at present, would be guaranteed a place in the following year’s tournament.

Under this system, most clubs and their fans would retain an interest for longer than is currently the case, as they won’t be eliminated at the group stage or in the early knock-out stage. They may also have some influence over who ultimately wins the competition, in the same way as the lower teams in the Premier League in England can.

The winners of the Europa League would be promoted to the Champion’s League the following year as this makes perfect sense, despite what stubborn old man at Arsenal thinks.

Under these formats the two European competitions would be played over a period of 22 and 26 weeks respectively. More games means more interest for a longer period of time and, importantly for UEFA, more money.

A change to the competitions such as this would probably put an end to the League Cup  or, at best, turn it into a cup for reserve teams, (if it isn’t that already), but this would be no bad thing as the teams who are not in Europe would be able to rest their players in midweek and the teams who are in Europe could concentrate on meaningful competition.

Remember that the teams competing in Europe generally have larger squads than those who don’t and can cope more easily with midweek games.

Anyway, it’s only an idea and will probably remain just that, but it also may work.

(There are more possibilities being investigated by UEFA according to this article in The Economist).