Duffers' Diaries: New Champions League, Europa League and Conference League format gets a thumbs up from me

Manchester City face a battle to stay in the Champions League. Photo: Mike Hewitt/Getty Images.Manchester City face a battle to stay in the Champions League. Photo: Mike Hewitt/Getty Images.
Manchester City face a battle to stay in the Champions League. Photo: Mike Hewitt/Getty Images.
On the face of it, having a 36-club league table with the ultimate aim being not to finish outside the top 24 is a bit bizarre.

But that’s what we were faced with when UEFA’s bods put their heads together to come up with a way of injecting some life into its club competitions.

I’m not daft – money will have been a driving factor in it all and of course more games equals more dosh. But was there a real chance this format might actually create a better spectacle than before?

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Not only that, it would apply to all three of the European competitions, thus ensuring some consistency across the board.

And to give credit where it’s due, I think it’s worked rather well.

The fact that with seven games played, in the case of the Champions League, it’s still in the balance as to whether some very big clubs might even make it to the knock-out stages, is testament to the competitive nature of the new format, irrespective of which teams may or may not get drawn against each other.

There have been a few mis-matches and heavy scorelines of course but that’s no different to before, and whilst clubs get more games than before to get it right, there’s also more scope for it to fall apart if you’re not on the ball for the duration.

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In the past, the outcome of the four-team groups would sometimes be a foregone conclusion before a ball had been kicked, and often by the fifth or sixth game there were some dead rubbers being played out.

And while there are likely to be one or two games with little riding on them going into the final round of games in all three competitions, by and large there is still a lot to play for.

It’s meant that every game has been crucial and even every goal given there are far more teams to overcome in the ‘goal difference’ column than ever before.

And it’ll also mean that the last day of the league phase will almost be as exciting as it often is for the climax of the domestic leagues, with teams likely to be in and out of the reckoning at numerous times in the evening.

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Granted, the new format has of course left us with something even more resembling the pie in the sky ‘European Super League’ that has been so often dismissed by anyone who genuinely cares about football, but if this is the closest we ever get to that then it’s fine by me, given how things have gone so far.

And of course it’s all so far removed from football at Championship level and below that for many, it’s just not of any interest whatsoever, an opinion I can empathise with given my love of lower and non-league football. But European football won’t be going away, so it may as well be exciting for those who do enjoy it.

The format has breathed new life into the ‘secondary’ competitions too. The Europa League still has some very big clubs involved and whilst it’s hard to shrug off the feeling of it being the consolation prize when compared to the Champions League, the quality of those taking part has in turn made the fact they’re all battling it out against each other already that much more enthralling.

Even the Conference League has held my interest in a bigger way this time around. Chelsea of course are widely regarded as ‘too good’ to be in it, but that’s likely to happen here and there when there are big and positive changes at a club compared to the previous season. The fact that clubs from the likes of Northern Ireland, Wales, Armenia and Azerbaijan are getting far more of a crack at the European whip then they might ever have had before has been another positive outcome of the changes.

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After the group stages, things revert more or less back to the formats we’re used to, with the initial play-offs to join the top eight sides in the knockouts and then from the last 16 onwards it being ‘as you were’ across the board.

But with group stages in the past often having done little to generate much in the way of excitement until someone needed a goal in the last minute to qualify as a runner-up, in my opinion this has been a rare thumbs up to UEFA.

Another plus for me has been the fact that those who finish in the bottom eight places don’t automatically drop down into the ‘lesser’ competition. If you’re out, you’re out of Europe completely, which I think some clubs would actually prefer to being made to then play in a competition in which they didn’t want to be involved in the first place, and is also fairer on those already in said competition given their rewards for progress won’t be at risk of an immediate kibosh from a ‘bigger’ team that failed elsewhere.

Could it be applied further afield? You could say that the World Cup and numerous continental tournaments could do worse than to follow a similar format, the headache there being that it would require more games in a much shorter time frame to make it work, particularly if FIFA are going to persist with having 48 teams involved in the case of the World Cup. Maybe two groups of 24?

Either way, from a European football perspective, for me it’s been a good thing, so let’s enjoy it before they come up with a hair-brained plan to ruin it all again in a few years’ time.

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