The cynics were wrong. It was not about staving off the threat of a breakaway Super League for a few more seasons by offering Europe’s top clubs a face-saving version of it. The new, expanded format of the Uefa Champions League would enable “more teams and therefore more coaches and players to compete in more competitive games on the European stage“. The “common purpose“, Uefa reminded us, was “to sustain domestic leagues”.
However, now that the first phase of the revamped Champions League is over, if the numbers are different (more games, more goals, more money), the story they tell, that of a competition remaining a closed shop for most, is not. The same forces dominate the European football landscape as they have done for close to two decades. None of the continent’s behemoths failed to qualify for the second stage of the tournament, despite the talk of “increased jeopardy” and Manchester City’s best efforts to engineer a self-inflicted shock to what is essentially a self-perpetuating system. The only “change” there has been is a further consolidation of the old order.
