The last eight of this season’s Champions League looks as good on paper as any quarter-final line-up. The draw almost guarantees four mouth watering two-legged ties.
But did the last round lack excitement, drama and talking points. Has the Champions League become too predictable?
FC Porto, Lazio and Inter Milan were three of the teams who led after the first leg and did not qualify for the last eight. Arsenal, Bayern Munich and Atletico Madrid overturned their ties and sent their opponents packing.
Manchester City’s two legged tie was more of a procession against FC Copenhagen, but was that the case for all the Round of 16 ties in the end?
Has the elite competition in club football become too predictable? As good as the quarter-final line-up is, you would’ve predicted all of them progressing and they did. Of course their quality on the pitch shone through in the end, but their financial muscle off of it also seems a decisive factor.
All eight games in the Round of 16 were won by the team with the bigger wage bill. All of the quarter-finalists are also in the top 15 places of the Deloitte Football Money League 2024.
The wealth spread amongst the dominant clubs in Europe’s top five leagues has become so far clear that even though Porto took Arsenal to penalties and RB Leipzig threatened to beat Real Madrid, the shocks are now very few and far between season on season.
Barring Real Madrid’s chaotic run to victory in the final in 2022, the knock-out stages have been very run of the mill over the last few years. Arguably, not since Roma’s 2018 run, Liverpool and Tottenham’s 2019 heroics and the shocks provided by Lyon and Porto in 2020, has the Champions League been tough to call.
Maybe this is why UEFA have decided to overhaul the current format and bring in a new Champions League next season?
The competition will expand from 32 teams to 36, and the group stages will be a league based format. In this, each team will play eight matches, four home and four away. All teams will be seeded in four different pots, with each team playing two teams from each pot.
This new format may make the Champions League more unpredictable. On UEFA’s website they stated: “The new format will introduce a better competitive balance between all the teams, with the possibility for each team to play opponents of a similar competitive level throughout the league phase.”
This will hopefully combat the issue of dead rubbers. In the league style format, every game will matter in trying to qualify for the next stage, jostling for a higher position in the table. On the last matchday all 18 games will be played simultaneously to create a grandstand finish.
The hope is that the tension will carry on throughout the group stages, giving scenarios where there is a lot to decide in the final few matchdays, making for more exciting games, adding to the unpredictability of the tournament.
Some may enjoy all the heavyweights of Europe progressing and leading to headline-making ties in the last eight and beyond. But for those who like under-dog stories, a bit of unpredictability and a change to the norm of whoever has the most money wins, the Champions League changes could solve that problem.
