The new Champions League sets up a high-stakes game in football’s ‘turning point’

As the competition’s new format gets underway this week, there is a lot more at stake than who lifts the trophy at the end of the season

Real Madrid won the European Cup for a record 15th time last season (Getty Images)

When Uefa president Aleksander Ceferin attends the first games of the new Champions League this week, it will be with a considerable security detail. This has led to grumbles from federation staff, especially since very few people outside football know what he even looks like. There have probably only been two moments when the Slovenian official was properly in the public eye.

One was when the Super League was launched in April 2021 and Ceferin admirably defended the spirit of European football in a defiant media appearance, all while lambasting executives as “snakes” and “liars”. Less publicised from that day was the fact Uefa were also in the process of approving the changes to the Champions League we are going to see enacted this week.

This directly led to the second time, as Ceferin was inexplicably put front and centre of Uefa’s launch video at the group-stage draw. There was no doubting who the star was supposed to be, given there were even jokes at Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s expense. The many actual football stars in the video weren’t given anything like the same status.

If it seems ironic to complain about that and also start a discussion about the same star-filled competition with talk of a football administrator, it is only because there is a lot more at stake here than who will win the trophy in May.

The modern Champions League has shown that question doesn’t really warrant proper analysis until the last 16, and that it will still be won by a club with a revenue of over €500m anyway. Probably Real Madrid, or Manchester City. Such predictability has fostered some of the reasons we’re here.

The world’s most lucrative international club competition finds itself at a curious juncture in its history, a crux that is remarkable given its immense global popularity. All of the evidence shows that interest in the opening stages was waning, however, and the round was becoming too predictable. Although this was actually because Uefa and the Champions League itself had facilitated – and even driven – huge financial gaps between the super clubs and the rest, the governing body’s response was to further bend to those clubs.

This 36-team opening-stage idea directly came from their executives leveraging the threat of the Super League, and then trying to advance with that project anyway.

That breakaway may have been averted, but the forces that created it were not. The Super League clubs are still agitating for more money, and more influence. That is why there are more games between big clubs, and the opening stage now stretches into January. It creates more events, and a bigger pot.

Ceferin presents a prize to Cristiano Ronaldo at the Champions League draw (AFP via Getty Images)

The intrigue is that Ceferin has now so individually associated himself with this idea, when there are significant political risks – not to mention risks for the future of the game. You only have to listen to the words of Damien Comolli, who long worked at two of the Super League clubs in Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur, and is still an executive in French football.

“If [the new format] works really well, then the Super League is dead in the water,” Comolli told The Independent last November. “If it doesn’t work well, then some people will try to come back and implement the Super League. So, for me, it’s a turning point in the history of European football.”

Those are huge words, but something like this has never been tried before. This so-called “Swiss system” is instantly a drastic move away from football’s classic four-team group structure that we're all used to. That’s already a lot for people to get their heads around, especially when the World Cup proves the format still works so well when there is competitive balance.

Without the latter, Uefa have been forced to try something else. It should be stressed that new ideas aren’t automatically a bad thing. Elements of this are genuinely exciting, especially the new variety and openness. Clubs like Celtic and Brugge have a better chance of Champions League knockout matches. Aston Villa and Bologna are clubs that bring a new feel. It’s just that any such idea is dependent on the reality of it working well, and that still features many familiar flaws.

As before, there isn’t enough peril for the super clubs. Much has been made of how so many modern Champions League finals are being repeated in this group stage: Milan-Liverpool, Manchester City-Internazionale, Liverpool-Real Madrid, Real Madrid-Borussia Dortmund, and that is part of the point. These early fixtures feel very far removed from the reckonings of a final, though, as so many of the big games have such low stakes. That’s because it’s virtually impossible for a wealthy club to finish outside the top 24.

Manchester City and Real Madrid will also play in the Club World Cup next summer (Getty Images)

While it is only the top eight who avoid the play-off and go directly to the last 16, the threat of two extra games just isn’t the same as the threat of elimination.

This is where the Champions League and modern football run into a circular issue, to the point we are starting to see the same fixtures again and again.

The super clubs and Real Madrid president Florentino Perez actively want this because they think this is what fans want.

Except, in trying to engineer this over three decades and through so many Super League threats, that shift only created a situation where – as Perez himself said - nobody watches the Champions League until the quarter-finals. Football's powers have simply diagnosed the wrong problem, so have the wrong solution. Uefa are instead just giving us more of the same.

Such anti-risk business rationale inevitably overlooks something intrinsic to sport. That is real risk and jeopardy, senses that are only heightened when such games have genuine meaning.

Part of the reason the European Cup and Champions League became so popular was because they built up to something massive, the stakes escalating. You can’t confect that.

Various interests will continue to try, though. That’s why this has to work for Uefa and Ceferin. If it really is just more of the same, there will be agitation again.

Fan revolt against the Super League led to its collapse in 2021 (Getty Images)

That is where so many strands of modern football come together, and partly why Ceferin is standing there at the centre. A mere two weeks after this season’s Champions League final in Munich, Fifa plan to launch their expanded Club World Cup. It's almost ridiculous to consider that the new European champions could have international matches and then head off to this new tournament in the US. The Club World Cup is almost a personal project for Fifa president Gianni Infantino, which maybe explains why Ceferin is front and centre of the Champions League given their petty personal rivalry.

Some of his clubs are eyeing it in a different way. If the Club World Cup grows, especially if backed by the expected Saudi financing that will make prize money lucrative, some clubs may view it as a potential international Super League by proxy; one they have even more influence in. Real Madrid lean towards Fifa.

The politics there are all the more interesting given we could be talking about a world where City are expelled from the Premier League. Hanging over all of this, then, is December’s European Court of Justice judgment that so questioned the governance of Uefa and Fifa. That is there to be tested in court, for all kinds of new competitions.

Uefa would point to how the Champions League is legally ring-fenced to take place in the regular season and also as the competition that crowns the champions of Europe.

As can be seen from how this season will start, though, there is more going on here than just who lifts the trophy in Munich.