Twelve of those clubs, including six from England, three from Spain and three from Italy, joined an ill-fated and short-lived attempt to start a breakaway European Superleague in 2021.
We don’t need to rehash in detail why that didn’t happen (fan protests and a lack of a coherent business model by the breakaway instigators), but even the existence of that plan was yet another sign to European governing body UEFA that they needed to innovate to keep the big guns on side.
It’s a purely personal view that the revamp has been, on balance, a good thing. The old format was hugely predictable, with eight groups of four playing six games each, mostly ending up with the two clubs with the largest wage bills in each group going through.
That doesn’t mean the new format is flawless; far from it. Just take a look at the 36-team league table at the end of the group phase and you can see that all the top 13 teams in that table — and 17 of the top 20 — are clubs from the “Big 5” leagues of Europe: the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, the Bundesliga and Ligue 1.
Money always talks in elite European football, and the Big 5 have the most money, by far. But I do think that the new format has given a new glimpse of possible success to some of the continent’s “smaller” clubs, such as Celtic…