Men's Football UEFA European Champions League 2024 - 2025

[heywoodu 14,883]

2 minutes ago, Ted said:

The main rationale behind the format change is reducing the number of uninteresting/unimportant matches and avoiding "rigging" results and fixing matches, which will obviously never happen.

I love it when federations decide for us which matches are and aren't interesting /sarcasm

 

One step closer to that Super League thingy where we'd get a billion Real Madrid - Manchester United, Manchester City - Bayern Munich and so on during the season. A season full of only big and special matches, meaning none of them are big and special anymore

 

Spoiler

But of course it sells merchandise and TV rights in the places where people think the sport consists only of the handful of billionaire teams, so that's bound to happen one day.

 

[Federer91 2,724]

I'm as traditional and anti-Super League as anyone you can get, but i'm optimistic about the new format.

 

For one it's still totally opposite of what the Super League wants to be. We don't have a closed league with 30+ matches in a season and you also depend on the domestic leagues to qualify. 

 

Also, as good as the old group stage format was, the last few years it became very double sided in my view. In the 2000s and early 2010s it was much more interesting, when the teams were more equal in strength and surprises happened. But in the past few years, with all the money involved the gap is widening between the elite 10 teams and the rest. 

 

And we usually got 2-3 really strong groups, where some teams got screwed and then we had 5 rather easy groups, with the big teams there had a cruise to the knockout stage, where after 3 matches it was virtually known what the final standing will be.

 

Now in the new format, where the knockout bracket is fixed by the positions in the league, there will be intrigue till the end i reckon. Plus with only 1 match between teams, there is a higher chance for a smaller team to upset a bigger one. If you have Man City - Sparta in 2 matches, you definitely know City are winning at minimum 1 of them. But in only 1 round, if they miss to beat Sparta, then lose to team 2 and have another draw with a smaller team, then their position in the table is affected much more serious.

 

I also really like, that after the league phase, we don't get teams dropping to the lower competitions. I have enough of teams like Barcelona or Man Utd phoning and moaning, when they drop to the Europa League. If you don't make the knockouts you are out, done..

 

The one thing i definitely don't like about the switch is that they gave 2 of the extra spots again to the top Nations with this bogus "best country coef. in a year" spot. They should have given them to the Q nations. The top 5 leagues have enough teams already. 

[heywoodu 14,883]

It might have some advantages, I get that, but it doesn't take away the fact that you simply can't make a remotely fair league standing when teams don't all play each other. There's no way you can compare team A and B on number of points gained when they didn't play the same teams (and/or each other)...

[NaBUru38 208]

The fully Swiss format is awful, as Heywoody says. I would prefer a 4-vs-4 cross-pool format.

 

But adding more matches at the group phase is a big problem too, the calendar was already too congested.

[Ted 140]

My home country team, Greece, are doing nicely atm.

Edited September 11 by Ted

[heywoodu 14,883]

13 hours ago, NaBUru38 said:

The fully Swiss format is awful, as Heywoody says. I would prefer a 4-vs-4 cross-pool format.

 

But adding more matches at the group phase is a big problem too, the calendar was already too congested.

Whatever format they use, it should always be one in which teams in the same standings have played the same teams, otherwise you simply can't compare them.

[Henry_Leon 1,370]

The new format of UCL start with a record-breaking win for Bayern München that became the first team to score nine in a single game.

 

• Harry Kane scored four, is the 20th player to score four or more goals in a single UEFA Champions League match
• Kenan Yıldız scored  the inaugural goal of the league phase era , and with 19 years and 136 days old, broke the record of Alessandro Del Piero as Juve's youngest goalscorer in the Champions League, excluding qualifying
• Aged 18 years and 58 days, Endrick became Real Madrid's youngest ever Champions League goalscorer

 

No surprise in the others matches, with the win of Juve, Liverpool, Real, Aston Villa and Sporting CP