Champions League Reform 2024: A big litter

When the Corona pandemic met the professional football a year ago, quiet hope came to: that he would now remember and return to his roots that he in humility to reverse some excesses and could take a step towards fans. But you know how that is with the hope: she lasts, but she dies.

The UEFA and her powerful Souffle use ECA had any other plans and rather designed a champion league reform, which comes like an armada on excavators and other heavy excavators: made to deepen trenches. Trenches between the clubs of the top class and all other, trenches between the professional football and the people who have ultimately made him great.

Because you can call this reform as a big litter, but just as a big litter in the middle of the face of the football fans.

The reform acts like a very last compromise in front of a Super League

The plans for the Champions League from 2024, which are already so advanced that only last details are missing, look like the result of a massive misunderstanding. As if fans had called by one side of the trench: Fewer Games! More permeability! Less inequality! And let the constant competitive reforms! And UEFA and ECA have understood on the other: More games! Less permeability! More inequality! And something with competitive reforms.

Of course, it was not that way, because then this fans had at least had been listened. But they had enough of their own problems: financial because of the drastic consequences of the Corona Pandemic and political, because despite the de facto ban through FIFA and UEFA still some clubs vehemently urged a Super League.

BVB-Boss Hans-Joachim Wake refers to the designed Champions League mode as a single way to prevent a Super League. And in fact, like a last compromise, this mode looks like a last compromise before encapsulation of the top clubs, with the compromise roughly said that the word was super pinned super pin with champions, and waterproof does not seem to be waterproof.

The attempt to make the Champions League more attractive is nowhere to be recognized

Now the current Champions League version with its low-stress group stage and the foreseeable eighth finishers truly delivered enough events to make the attempt to make them more attractive. But that is probably the worst of the remembered reform: that this attempt is not recognizable at any point. She units everything badly what one can do this competition.

Background: The details of the Champions League mode from 2024

Attractiveness is in the eye of the viewer. But what is attractive to develop around 100 Champions League games in an already overflowing calendar than before and further increase the long-term border stress? Why do 180 preliminary round games have to take place in a 36er league after the complicated Swiss model, to determine which twelve teams do not move into the K.'s Phase? And why, Bichon, should clubs from the obliged still get more starting places, possibly even if they are only sixth or seventh?

These are not rhetorical questions: Attractive is that all the million heavy collateral offers, according to which Real Madrid, Bavaria Munich or Juventus Lech zen, Bayern Munich or Juventus. The reform guarantees each participant even more Champions League performances and thus revenue per season. It says: play games to play games. Whether it's about something, first does not matter. And who weakens in the preliminary round can even be a table-offs via play-offs. Still reach the second round; Who plays nationally a bad season, obviously qualify for the Champions League thanks to previous successes. As long as the worldwide ratings are correct, the bill will be raised.

Royal Class was always the honest title: The nobility remains among themselves

A Champions League had never been the Champions League, since she said, royal class was over the years to the honest name, because the nobility likes to be among themselves. From 2024 is closed company at the Champions League door, and the necessary code word only knows who has always been there. Again, football is taken a large piece of its greatest strength: unpredictability, unexpected.

The pandemic — this in turn was foreseeable and expected — has not contributed to the European Local Level, but seems to have released resistance and have released thoughts that were previously unthinkable. Many things that were in football earlier than blasphemy are completely normal today, said ECA and Juventus-Boss Andrea Agnelo for reform. He certainly thinks, that would be something good.

(This text was first published on March 25, 2021)