Mark Langdon: Feeling positive for new Champions League format

Pep Confidential, the book following Pep Guardiola's first season at Bayern Munich, is ten years old and yet I still find myself being drawn back to segments a decade after it was published.

The standout quote is more about life than football. "People like change as long as it is exactly the same as it was before," and it's natural to be nervous about embarking on something new.

And so after 20 years the Champions League format has been changed and the group stage has been replaced by a league phase from this season. 

The good news is that it surely can't be any worse than the often dull fixtures served up and the more I have studied the switch to a 36-team single league before a knockout phase the better it appears.

I am told Uefa have modelled the format "millions of times" and it has thrown up fewer dead-rubbers, while given that the seedings for the knockout stage will depend on final league positioning there will be incentives to finish as high as possible, even if a team have secured a spot in the top eight, which offers a straight passage through to the last 16, or in the band from ninth to 24th, which leads to a playoff knockout round to join those who have already qualified.

One of the Champions League's biggest issues was the repetition of fixtures and it felt as if the same teams would constantly play each other – for example, Manchester City scored 21 goals against Leipzig in six matches between September 2021 and November 2023.

This league phase changes that as sides now play eight different opponents, and while previously no seed from pot one would face another top-tier team, now you play two. And those in pot four were often tailed off playing constant mismatches whereas now they also get a couple of fixtures more at their level.

Paris St-Germain statistically have the hardest set of fixtures with games against Girona, Arsenal, PSV, Atletico Madrid, Bayern Munich, Salzburg, City and Stuttgart. That looks much better than a standard Champions League group, while Celtic are said to have the easiest path. Dates with Slovan Bratislava, Dortmund, Atalanta, Leipzig, Club Brugge, Dinamo Zagreb, Aston Villa and Young Boys gives the Bhoys a chance of extending their Champions League participation which previously seemed a step too far.  

Just three teams – City, Real Madrid and Arsenal – are 4-9 or shorter to make the top eight and Bayern Munich (4-7), Liverpool (8-11) and Barcelona (5-6) are the only other odds-on shots. When you see top sides like Atletico (7-5), Bayer Leverkusen (7-4), Inter (7-4), Dortmund (2-1), PSG (2-1) and Juventus (3-1) all scrambling for a direct path through it adds a sense of urgency to the league phase.

Football Meets Data on X modelled 10,000 league phases and there is a 76 per cent chance that teams will need at least 15 points to qualify directly for the last 16, while for smaller teams nine points is the target for 24th. That tally would be good enough for qualification in three quarters of those simulated competitions.

There is potentially less jeopardy given that even the team who finish 24th get a second bite of the cherry. However, the lower you finish the harder your draw is likely to be in the knockouts as the path to the final is set out according to rankings, much like a tennis or snooker competition.

Looking at a bracket and working out the routes to the final is one of the joys of a World Cup or Euros and is just another reason to embrace this new-look Champions League. Now all we need is to see how Gareth Southgate can somehow find himself in the easy half and still mess it up.

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