As from 2018 the UEFA Champions League will change appearance, and not a change in the system for the competition, but some changes in the means of qualification.
As we can see, up to 2017/2018, the formula will be based, as before, on the participation of 32 teams, of which 22 with direct qualification and the remaining 10 with qualification through the preliminary stage. In accordance with the UEFA ranking of federations, the following will have direct access to the group stage: the top 3 teams from the top 3 championships in Europe, the top 2 teams from the federations ranked between 4th and 6th place and the reigning champions for the federations between 7th and 12th place. These teams will be joined in the group stage by 5 teams which are title holders from smaller nations, which can only qualify through the preliminary qualification stage, and 5 of the best placed teams in national championships (the teams immediately below direct qualification) from the 15 best championships.
UEFA’s official website sets out clearly that the formula to qualify for the new Champions League will vary according to some new parameters. Above all as from 2018/2019 four teams from the four top nations will have direct access to the group stage.
Initially the UEFA meeting discussed a possible direct qualification for the group stage for the team with best historic record, instead of the 4th placed team from the top 4 European championships (in other words the team which over the years had taken part in and won most European competitions). This proposal was however not approved and it was decided that it would be the 4th placed team, together with the top 3, to have an automatic place among the contenders for the Champions League title. These 16 teams will then be joined by the winner of the previous Champions League, as usual, and by the winner of the Europa League, who will qualify directly as one of the best 32 teams in Europe.
The 3 federations which are placed between 5th and 7th place in the UEFA ranking (currently France, Portugal and Russia) will seemingly be allowed to have the top two teams from each championship qualify directly for the group stage. However, not all the access parameters have been clarified for teams belonging to nations below fourth place in the ranking, and UEFA has let it be known that everything will be made official by the end of the year.
Focussing on the four top championships, which as from 2018 will have guaranteed access for four teams to the UCL, here is how their situation would be now in terms of participation in the group stage.
Therefore, if the formula were already in place which will start in 2018, the 11 directly qualified teams from England, Spain, Germany and Italy would be joined by another 5 (Manchester City, Villareal, Borussia M’Gladbach, AS Roma and Inter Milan), without the need to go through the play-off stage.
As regards England and Germany, currently there would be no difference because both Manchester City and Borussia M’Gladbach managed to get through the preliminary stage and qualify for the group stage. We cannot say the same for Spain, which lost Villareal in the play-off stage, and Italy which saw the immediate elimination of AS Roma by Porto, and where Inter Milan, which finished fourth in the Serie A, was not even contemplated as being in the preliminary stage of the Champions League this year, but was directly “demoted” to the Europa League.
We will see some changes also in the system of dividing bonuses: on the one hand, there will be a 20% drop in the amount to be distributed to the various participants, 20% which will instead be added in its turn to the value of the possible bonuses which teams may win depending on the results achieved in the competition. Therefore, the amounts from simple participation will be lower, but there will be an increase in revenues for the teams which manage to perform best in the competition itself. In this way more prominence will be given to the teams which manage to get furthest in the tournament.
Again in the areas of changes in the financing system, also within the UEFA Europa League we will see an increase in the value of the bonuses for the participating teams, and at the same time here the 48-team competition format will be maintained.
All these new facts are without doubt of benefit to the top four European federations, since besides having more chance of at least of their teams managing to progress in the competition (given that they will have more teams competing), they are the federations which usually have the strongest teams in Europe in the Champions League, and which have, since they are more competitive, also more chance of achieving higher revenues thanks to their success in the most important European competition.
Another change is the new system of coefficients for clubs which as from 2018 will be calculated on the basis of the individual clubs and their historic success in the competition. In this way the percentage of national representation will fall due to the coefficient for clubs, unless the individual coefficient is 20% below the coefficient of the federation. In addition, no longer will the ranking be calculated just on the basis of the last 5 seasons, but it will also take into consideration a weighting on an historical basis, calculated in accordance with the following principle: the further back in time we go, the more the importance of the result will diminish. The impact on the ranking of a very old result will therefore be very marginal, but despite this for the first time it will be worth something at least. In order to calculate these historical merit weightings for the ranking three time periods will be taken into consideration (from 1956, the year the European Cup started, up to 1993; from 1993, the first year of the Champions League, up to 2008; and finally from 2008 to 2018), among which the most recent time period will count for most towards the coefficient.
In addition, the ranking will be very important in economic terms – the higher the value of the club, the more it will earn for its participation in the Champions League – and in terms of position, since as from 2018 it will no longer necessarily be the teams which win the various championships who are part of the top seeded group in draws, but it will be teams with the highest ranking.
It really seems then that European football is increasingly moving towards a European Super League, the championship which the big clubs in Europe wanted to start to the exclusion of all the teams from the lesser championships. Despite not achieving this goal, the big European teams have nothing to complain about in this new formula for the UEFA tournament.
However, the latest news is that the new UEFA President, Aleksander Ceferin, is not wildly enthusiastic about the new regulation for the competition which will be official as from 2018, since it is too advantageous to the richest European clubs and consequently penalises the outsiders in Europe, who would be increasingly marginalised in the competition.