More matches only means more mediocrity with latest Champion League plans… the 24th best team is not an elite club
- Plans to expand the Champions League format are currently being discussed
- The move comes as an attempt to derail the huge Premier League football deal
- More matches are proposed to be added yet this will impact the quality
- Premier League teams would be better off resisting the attempts for a refresh
Nineteen matches in one season is not a cup competition. And the 24th best team in the Champions League is not an elite club. Yet both will feature in the latest proposal to derail English football with a European super league.
Make no mistake, this is what it is all about. The Premier League and its fabulous TV deal, dwarfing the revenue streams of Europe’s biggest and most entitled.
They are desperate to smash it, at least to match it, these clubs, and because there is not the same overseas markets for their repetitious domestic leagues, the only way to do this is through Europe.
Plans to expand the Champions League format are currently being discussed at top level
So here we go again, with the latest assault masquerading as an upgrade for the current European competitions. The European elite are no different to a bunch of rogue property developers, submitting plan after plan in the hope those who object will eventually get bored with resisting.
We cannot let them wear us down. The Champions League is fine as it is. Not perfect, but the balance is largely right. The group stage contains just enough freshness to be interesting, and successfully sorts out the stronger sides so that the knockout rounds are compelling.
Teams play home and away, which is fair. This season’s last 16 draw is made on Monday. It promises some fine match-ups.
The 24th best team in this season’s Champions League, Dinamo Zagreb, were thrashed at City
Not enough, apparently. More matches, more matches. That is what people want, apparently.
And more mediocrity, too, because in this new proposal, just because a team has finished 24th of 32 that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be in the next round.
Do you know who was the 24th best team in this season’s Champions League? Dinamo Zagreb — last seen being beaten 4-1 at home by Manchester City, in game that meant nothing to Pep Guardiola and his players.
Yet they’d be part of this brave new world, in which clubs from nine to 24 in the new super league play-off for eight places, home and away.
The top eight teams will already have progressed having played a random 10 opponents in one-off, not two leg, games. So let’s get this right. Progress to the last 16 does not require home and away fixtures in one path, but will for another.
The European Clubs’ Association — whose dribble of idiocy this is — have taken the worst element from the new European Championship qualification routes and turned it into a format. Competitions that do not make sense are a turn-off.
One of the strongest objections to the 39th game was that it made the Premier League lop-sided. One team would get three goes at Norwich, another three matches against Liverpool.
More Champions League fixtures would likely directly impact the quality of football
If anything, the ECA proposal is worse. How many dead rubbers will this 10-match programme create? Teams that have long qualified, teams going through the motions.
If ninth play 24th in the play-off, using this season’s competition that would pit Zagreb against Chelsea.
We know Chelsea are superior; yet it will take 12 matches to get where six have brought us now. And all because the elite clubs from Europe’s biggest leagues have contrived to create domestic products the world thinks are dull.
So, having ruined their own leagues, why would we let them loose on one that works? Their greed should be resisted like any lousy update. Ignore it. Your equipment will still work just fine.