The Champions League needs to be reinvented. It is obvious. The threat of the Super League (much more advanced than many believe) and a model wore out by use, not by lack of interest, push the arrival of changes, modifications of a competition classified as the best in the football world. Some press for more money and others for more entertainment so much so that even Rummenigge dares to speak of a Superbowl when that game that final, and that football party already exists with the current Champions League.
The present format already contemplates that game as a maximum media and commercial exposure, but the pandemic and that final to eight that Aleksander Ceferin and company invented to be able to finish the last Champions League. This change has served so that many have lit the light on the possible route of the format changes in the final part of the competition, but the reality is that the modifications that are studied and are aimed at priority for the initial part of the competition.
UEFA is moving in the quest to give satisfaction, something complicated, and to some extent, impossible. The highest body of European football has already sold the next three years of all competitions, both in audiovisual and commercial issues, to the clubs themselves and, by extension, to the federations. In theory, the competition format is the same, but UEFA itself assumes that changes are needed and that is what is currently under study.
Twelve venues multiply the problems
changes that are also going to affect the Eurocup, the economic manna of European football above the Champions League, the vast majority of which are going to the clubs. The Eurocup in twelve venues seems like a utopia right now. The EUFA is collecting information and it remains to be seen the response of those twelve cities, Bilbao, among them in charge of shaping a Eurocup that Platini invented and which is creating headaches since its launch. Having an alternative is an obligation and work is underway for this and will be announced in the first days of February at a meeting of the Executive. The pandemic has delayed the usual February-March congress of every year to April. Swiss football, with its president DDominiqueBlancAt the head, was the first to raise his voice advancing what seems to be a reality and that is that the Eurocup as it is conceived is of complicated execution. Ceferin has been working on possible changes to the Champions League for more than a year. His plans always aimed from 2024, but everything is rushing. In these eighteen months of searching, countless models have appeared and the UEFA president himself has not turned his back on it.
After the pandemic, we had to make a system like this. We had to play this way, but in the end, we see that it is an interesting system. People want exciting matches, that in one match all teams can beat all teams from Champions League or Europa League. So it’s something to consider for the future sentenced while Bayern lifted the cup to the Lisbon sky. Audiovisual rights marketing clubs format There has been talking of groups of eight, of groups of six, of crosses as before of the Lisbon-style final phase, of the semifinals to a match but never as a closed League. From UEFA and the Federations maintain that an NBA-style League would kill the spirit of football. Years ago, the Champions League was played for three seasons in a two-phase format of groups of four teams from 2000 to 2003.
The clubs asked that it be suppressed due to the lack of interest in the two phases to try to reverse at the last minute. Since the 2003-2004 campaign, the only change suffered by the maximum continental competition has come from the hand of the pandemic, showing that the current situation can be improved. The shadow of the Superliga, the one that has grown outside the ECA (club association) and UEFA itself and sheltered by alleged investors, has also pressured, as happened in the early nineties, in which since the Nyon headquarters opened its hand, both sportingly and financially, to the requests of the now-famous G-14, the germ of an ECA that is clearly in decline in terms of power and influence within European football.
Some of the teams see as insufficient those 1,950 million euros that UEFA distributes every year in the Champions League and of which the winner usually takes an amount close to one hundred million. In this Superliga project there has been talking of up to 500 million per season, an amount out of the market no matter how much investment funds are behind the project. It is true, as some leaders have confessed to MARCA, that the constant confrontations Among the big companies in Europe, would raise the price of the product both commercially and audiovisual, but that money is currently out of the market, just as current television contracts are moving and the problems of some operators to be able to face subscribed payments. Super League, Club World Cup, and Local LeaguesThe
