Over the last 15 years, club football has consistently peaked – in terms of drama and entertainment at least – with Champions League semi-final second legs.
Trent Alexander-Arnold’s ballboy-aided corner. Lucas Moura’s miracle and six Ajax players lying on the turf. Gary Neville’s Fernando Torres-inspired original goalgasm. Didier Drogba screaming “f**king disgrace” into the camera, as if Truman Burbank had worked it all out. “The most beautiful defeat” of Jose Mourinho’s life.
You can guess where this is going. Football governance ploughs an excellent furrow in fixing things that aren’t broken and maintaining – or exacerbating – status quos that threaten to pass the point of no return.
Uefa president Aleksander Ceferin is reportedly in favour of scrapping the two-legged Champions League semi-finals in favour of a week-long mini-tournament that will take place in the same city. At some point in the near future, someone in a suit will use the phrase “Festival of football” and we will know it is inevitable.
Each of these grand ideas come with their own giveaway traits. There is the self-congratulatory tone that aims to convince us that we are all being led one step closer to football utopia and this is all part of some natural process. Nothing could be further from the truth: the principle reason for these ideas holding some appeal is because they offer answers to problems their proponents created.
Make no mistake: this new idea is a brazen attempt to reduce fixture congestion. The shift to the “Swiss-style” Champions League model, due to begin in 2024-25, will almost double the number of Champions League matches per season to 225; teams will play 10 group games rather than six. By effectively reducing the semi-finals and finals from three matchweeks to one, you create space for your bloated monster.
Then there are the vested interests. We are told that Nasser Al-Khelaifi, the president of PSG who used the failed Super League project to grab power by being installed as the chairman of the European Club Association, is strongly in favour of the proposed changes. Who knows why the president of a super-rich club that has repeatedly crumbled in second legs, and reached the final in 2019 when the quarter- and semi-finals were played in a similar format due to Covid-19 restrictions, would prefer a permanent version of the same plan.
True to form, an idea that might hold some appeal in theory sees it dissipate in practice. Match-going football supporters are famously not fleeced enough. Making them choose between booking an entire week in the same city in case their team makes it through the first game or booking a flight home and then having to fly back two days later probably seems eminently reasonable if you are not used to ever paying for your ticket or accommodation.
It also inevitably creates a small cabal of potential host cities, namely those who can accommodate 100,000 fans en masse at the same time. Over the last seven years, the Champions League final has been held in Berlin, Milan, Cardiff, Kyiv, Madrid, Lisbon, Porto. Only two of those (Berlin, Madrid) could likely host the week-long event. Add in the other obvious places to be rotated: Paris and London.
There are two broad storylines in football’s dystopian future. The first is the naked power grabs by financial super clubs attempting to ring fence their wealth, and the tiptoed path that governing bodies must take as a result: giving enough to keep them quiet for a while but don’t give them so much that it becomes obvious that the whole sport is coordinated by a select group of multibillionaires.
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If Manchester City and Liverpool reach this season’s final (as they are expected to do), six of the last eight final participants will come from Europe’s wealthiest league. The exceptions are Paris Saint-Germain (state-owned, domestically dominant with eight of the last 10 league titles) and Bayern Munich (domestically dominant with 10 of the last 10 league titles.
Predictability is the greatest driver of these changes. It requires that the Champions League is rolled in glitter to make it shine. Make it a showpiece. Copy the Super Bowl. Who’s doing the half-time show this year? Can we crowbar in a meaningless, trumped-up awards ceremony in between the matches? As soon as you hear the suggestion, you know it will inevitably become reality.
If the Champions League semi-finals need shoehorning, it is because they bloated the group stage. If they believe that the biggest matches in the biggest competition needs extra pizazz, maybe they care too much about pizazz. If there is surgery required, it is because they dropped the ball and cracked it in three places. Just another example of unnecessary change disguised as progress.
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