New Champions League Format Is a Reskinned Super League
The Super League was proposed to Europe’s top clubs in 2021 as an alternative to participating in the Champions League with some enticing alterations to the prestigious competition. The Super League promised to help top clubs avoid the uncertainty of not finishing high enough in the league to qualify for the competition as well as offering a better compensation scheme to the 15 founding clubs. Due to the better terms for the teams participating, the league gained members across Europe’s top leagues and looked promising until the public delivered its opinion. The league was emphatically denied by fans seeing through the obvious money grab, players and managers enraged by the lack of diversity of competition and opportunity to participate, and lastly by UEFA and FIFA among other governing bodies who would have no control over the league.
The Super League was denied wholeheartedly by the footballing world leaving the chairman and club owners who proposed it seeping back into their corner offices to wait for better timing. However, the failed competition seemingly left a mark on the sport as the Champions League has adopted a new format that looks suspiciously like the ghost of what the Super League could’ve been. The new format is a Frankenstein mixture of a traditional league format through the first round being a table-styled competition then leading into the more usual tournament bracket system afterward. With the first game week of the new style behind us, it is apparent that the competition has evolved giving smaller teams greater exposure through getting pummeled by Europe’s giants as seen in the Bayern Munich versus Dinamo Zagreb game where the Croatian team lost nine to two to the Bavarian side. Although the new format is reminiscent of the failed league, it is different in ways that keep the competitive diversity and opportunity of a UEFA competition.
Teams must still qualify by finishing high enough on their domestic league tables to participate, ensuring the best teams of the time get in instead of just the teams who paid to be founders of the competition. Teams are also regulated by UEFA in coordination with FIFA to maintain financial fair play and governance regulations to ensure the teams compete in fair and ethical ways. However, most importantly the integrity of the sport has remained in the interest of the fans and not turned over to greed. The new Champions League may resemble the ideas presented by the Super League but has been crafted to only provide fans the chance to see the best teams in Europe collide and for those teams to gain opportunities they otherwise would have never gotten.
