More. Always more. Everything that happens in football now is about expansion. Make every tournament bigger. Play more games. Produce more content. Generate more revenue. On Wednesday, the UEFA Executive Committee discussed plans to reform the Champions League from 2024 onwards, specifically the idea of rejigging the group stage to the so-called Swiss System, which will, of course, ensure more games.
A formal announcement had been expected on Wednesday, but that has now been pushed back until April 19, largely because a small group of the super-rich clubs—understood to be a coalition of the Spanish sides and at least two clubs with U.S. owners—has rejected UEFA's proposal for a 50-50 share in a joint venture that would control the commercial rights of the Champions League. That, in turn, has created a backlash from other members of the European Clubs Association (ECA), most notably Bayern Munich and Paris Saint-Germain. But whoever actually is in charge, nobody expects anything other than agreement on the adoption of the Swiss model.
Quite how serious the hold-up is is not yet clear, but this is a critical moment. If UEFA gives up control of the competition, it is finished as a serious governing body. It will no longer have any influence to check the whims of the superclubs. The Champions League will have become an autonomous Super League in all but name, and there will not even be the pretense that Europe’s premier competition is being run for the good of the game, or for anything other than enriching the already extremely rich.
That the formal acceptance of that has itself been delayed by greed is not surprising. This whole business is about greed. It’s about the acceleration of a process that has been going on for a little over three decades. It’s about the triumph of neoliberalism in football.
But let’s begin with the basics. Nobody denies that the group stage of the Champions League, as it stands, is a gloomy trudge. Andrea Agnelli, the chairman of Juventus and the ECA, got that right. After the draw, you can go through each group, highlight the two obviously richer teams and be relatively confident they will progress. Very occasionally some quirk of the seeding will lead to an unusually tight group (as when RB Leipzig, whose coefficient is low because it is a relative newcomer at the elite level, was drawn alongside PSG and Manchester United this season) or some big club (usually Inter) will mess up, but generally the gulf between rich and poor is too great for those games to be anything other than highly predictable.
The shift in tone as the tournament moves into the knockout stage is obvious. This season's was not a classic round of 16, far from it, but it did feature one tie of exceptional drama and quality: Porto’s away-goals victory over Juventus. The second leg was a tie that had everything: a favored side in trouble, an unlikely comeback, a stupid red card, a dogged rearguard action, an unexpected game-changing free kick, one last dramatic twist. It was a game that transformed Cristiano Ronaldo, for turning his back in the wall, into a villain and, implausibly, Pepe, a hero. It highlighted the immense promise of Federico Chiesa and confirmed the emerging talent of Sérgio Oliveira. It brought joy, and it brought sorrow. Crucially, there were consequences: progress to the quarterfinal for Porto and yet another premature exit for Juventus. There was jeopardy—and that feels like the key.
