What does the Champions League's new format mean for the future of the Bundesliga?
UEFA's rebuilt competition is a Super League in all but name and that will likely have a serious impact on how the Bundesliga's biggest clubs treat domestic competitions in the future.
This week’s newsletter was supposed to be on the remarkable exploits of Hoffenheim striker Maximilian Beier. The young German goal scorer has now bagged two braces in as many match days and looks set to be one of Julian Nagelsmann’s fresh faces at this summer’s Euros. Fortunately for me, Hoffenheim and the entire German nation, Beier will almost certainly continue scoring goals as the season rumbles on and we can examine his remarkable talent in the weeks and months to come. All in good time.
What instead stole my attention this week was a video posted on all of UEFA’s social media channels on Monday afternoon explaining the new format for next season’s Champions League. In case you’ve been living under a rock (or perhaps far too engrossed in German football) the basic premise of the revamped competition is an expansion from 32 teams to 36 teams, as well as a single league rather than multiple groups before the knock-out rounds. UEFA’s video isn’t actually too bad and is perhaps the best way to make sense of the new format.
My primary concern over this new format is whether it will be better than the last one. Will it lead to more interesting games? Fewer “dead rubbers”? Fairer standings for clubs from smaller nations? And, of course, what it will mean for the Bundesliga going forward? That’s obviously impossible to really predict with any certainty at this moment in time, but it could lead to some rather dramatic changes in the structure of European football as a whole and as a result German football too.
To understand this new format we must first get to the crux of the issue that UEFA has been trying to fix for some time: emboldened by the failure of the Super League launch but still terrified of the slow creep of the Premier League’s financial dominance over the rest of European football, this new Champions League format has been tailor-made to not facilitate English football but to instead try to cut it off at the pass. Which is either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on our own personal perspective.
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