Why? Well, some good teams that can improve the average talent in the tournament (such as Monaco and Lazio this year and Napoli last year) would no longer lose in qualifying, a smaller number of medium size countries that can be competitive in the group stage (Poland, Czech Republic, Cyprus, Romania, etc.) would have a better chance to qualify, and the money would be spread around Europe a little bit more. The format: 8 groups of 5 (8 matches per team, 10 total match days, 2 byes per team) Group winners automatically advance to the Round of 16 Runners-up and 3rd placers advance to Playoff Round (8 winners of that round advance to Round of 16) 4th and 5th placers are done in Europe (no Europa League drop-downs) Access list does not change (number of teams per country does not change) Automatic group stage participants (32): Leagues 1-3: 1st-4th Leagues 4-6: 1st-3rd Leagues 7-8: 1st-2nd Leagues 9-14: 1st CL/EL title holders 8 teams come through qualifying: 3rd Qualifying Round (losers drop into Europa League group stage) Leagues 9-12: 2nd 12 winners from previous round 2nd Qualifying Round (losers are done in Europe) Leagues 15-19: 1st Leagues 13-15: 2nd 17 winners from previous round 1st Qualifying Round (losers are done in Europe) Leagues 20-54 (excluding Liechtenstein): 1st The Europa League would also have this 40-club format but with four qualifying rounds instead of three for the Champions League (the first of those four qualifying rounds would be called the Preliminary Round).
You're adding four match days to the group stage. Where on earth on the calendar will you fit these games? Combining those extra games with the Playoff Round, you're having 16 clubs playing a total of four extra matches. This is the same situation when there was a second group stage followed the initial September-December group stage (2000-2003). Didn't UEFA eliminate that second group stage due to complaints from clubs of fixture congestion? The second group stage was replaced with the Round of 16 which cut out four matches. And now you want to put those four matches back in? And that's not even mentioning the potential problems of having an odd number of clubs in each group. With one club having a bye on the final group match day there's the potential of collusion being created. Ugh...
I wouldn't have a problem with some more champions from lesser leagues reaching the Group Stage, but as unclesox said there aren't enough weeks to fit the extra games in. English clubs have Capital One Cup games midweek and there are weeks with national team games.
I'm aware of the collusion aspect, and as far as where to put the matches, UEFA would have to demand four more match days. The big clubs want to spice up the group stages. There used to be 8 matches before Christmas with the two group stage format. I don't believe UEFA eliminated the group stage necessarily for fixture congestion, as I believe the bigger clubs wanted to keep it (more money). It was likely the FAs that had a problem with it as they had to rearrange cups in particular.
To cut down on too many matches being played, why not reduce league counts from the normal 20 team leagues to 15? That would mean fewer domestic fixtures per team (28 from 38), but the matches that would be lost are the ones featuring the top vs current bottom sides. It saves 10 matches for top sides and these can be distributed to European competitions. The Champions League is such an excellent competition pitting the best vs the best, yet it feels entirely too short relative to the current drawn out domestic leagues. I thought the two group stage format was great. It results in higher quality matches in the 2nd group stage. Imagine a second group stage of Barca, Zenit, PSG, Arsenal, Bayern, Chelsea, Roma, PSV Real, Wolfsburg. Juve, Gent Atleti, City, Benfica, Kiev Again to accommodate more CL fixtures it would mean losing domestic matches such as Juve vs Carpi, Barca vs Sporting Gijon, Bayern vs Darmstadt, City vs Norwich etc. I think expanding the CL this way is worth the trade off of smaller league counts.
What are the teams that aren't in the Champions League going to do with these newly spare dates? And who is going to compensate them for losing a number of games and match day revenue?
An odd number of clubs isn't great. 16 clubs would be better than 15. With 38 games, you can mark the halfway point, but 1/3rd, 1/4th, 1/5th, 1/6th, etc. of the season are not whole numbers of games. With 30 games, 1/3rd, 1/5th, and 1/6th of the season would be whole numbers of games. As lanman said, in addition to clubs not in UEFA competitions having fewer games, it would make it harder for clubs to stay in the top level with fewer clubs in that level. England has 20 clubs in the Premier League and 24 in the next few levels below that. If the Premier League went down to 16 clubs and League Championship, League One, etc. remained at 24 clubs, the Premier League would have 16 fewer games per club than League Championship, League One, etc.
The UCL doesn't get interesting until the quarterfinals arrive. Bring back the second group stage for THAT?! No thanks. None of those groups sound appealing to me.
No matter what one decides whether a Super league, expansion of the CL, change in national league structure to improve competitiveness, etc. there will always be trade-offs that create winners and losers. A 16 team top division where the bottom two play in a playoff to decide who is dropped while the 2nd division winner and runner up play for advancement could mitigate some of these issues. Even in this hypothetical format some teams would be very unhappy. Nothing would be perfect and the current league structures certainly aren't either. Germany already has a top division consisting of 18 teams. Strong rumors suggest that Italy will be moving in this direction. Another solution would be to scrap domestic cup competitions or at least curtail them. Then again if you are in the camp that think things are fine as they are then there is little point thinking about it. That means keeping the CL at the same number of matches now despite it being the premier competition that decides who is the best in all of Europe. I'm just of the opinion that the number of matches teams play in this competition are too few. I want to see the best of the best compete against each other more often than they do. A second group stage allows fans more of the best teams compete against each other. It more greatly ensures that the best teams make it furthest in the competition. Admittedly the second group stage does look a bit weak in some ways but that has more to do with teams like Kiev, Gent, Wolfsburg, Zenit making it further than they normally would. Eventually I assume that the likes of Inter, AC Milan, Dortmund, United, Liverpool will find themselves at a high enough level to compete well in the CL. Even still, those group may feature one weak side but it still offers very interesting match ups that we often wouldn't see.
The game is about more than just the top teams though - it's about every level of the game down to grass roots. More people turn up to watch teams not in the Champions League every week than watch Champions League matches - why would you reduce their access to their team?
Reducing the number of teams in the top division doesn't reduce access to anyone's teams. They would just be in a lower division. Germany has 18 sides currently. Italy is strongly rumored to be doing to same soon. A 16 team league isn't a stretch. The very bottom sides are already highly susceptible to eventually move down to the second division anyways. The point is to reduce fixture congestion and have teams that are on a comparable level more often compete with one another.
Of course it does. Newcastle will have 19 home league games this season with around 50,000 fans attending each one. With an 18 team division they would have 17, in a 16 team division they would have 15 - less matches for the fans and less revenue for the club. Fewer match days would also mean less TV revenue. The game is about more than the Champions League teams, and the other teams would all lose out with a smaller top division.
To me they still look more appealing (and more competitive!!) than the 32 team group-stage. There is such a separation gap now between the top 4 or 5 teams in Europe and the #25-32 teams or even with the #17 team in Europe, that it makes a 32-team group stage kinda tedious. Personally, I would like to see a knockout stage to replace the group-stage to narrow the field from 32 to 16. The 16 winners then advance to a group stage with 4 groups of 4. The 16 losers can join the 48 teams that got through Europa League qualifying, leaving a perfect 64 teams in that competition (note that this way every team that will partake in the EL joins it at the beginning, not this non-sense of having 8 teams enter half-way through).
The seeding would matter so much though. You could see top 16 sides face each other prematurely depending on the draw. I like the double group stages because it's hard to imagine the best sides not coming out of that.
I could see how the seeding may be a bit more important, but unless I'm missing something, in the current format if 3 of the top 16 teams in Europe got thrown into the same group, there's no-way you can wind-up with the best 16 teams advancing. Using a real-life example, lets take a tough group from this season's competition: Juventus, Man City, Sevilla, Borussia M. With a knockout stage, we would have had #1 Juve v #4. Borussia M & #2. Man City v #3 Sevilla. Would the KO format unfairly hurt anyone, and if so, who? Sevilla lost twice to Man City so with a group-stage they have another 4 games to redeem themselves, but if they can't get the better of Man City -whether in group-stage or knockout format - its going to be very difficult for them to advance anyway. Maybe Borussia M is hurt a bit with a KO format playing against only the finalists of last season, w/o a chance to prove they are second-best among this group of 4. But is it unfair? I don't think so...
Fair enough, but there were CL groups in the first stage that were quite poor which resulted in that group of death. The seeding system changed so that a greater number of league champions had a better shot at advancing in the competition. I think that is pretty fair and my hope is that this creates a broader playing field so that the best teams aren't so concentrated. With a second group stage, it provides another filter and gives better teams that just so happened to be matched in a tougher initial groups a better chance of advancing further. The two leg KO format with the away goals rule can be very unforgiving. Look at the ESPN power rankings. The 2nd and 3rd highest rated sides are playing each other in the R16 while Wolfsburg vs Gent face-off. The current system doesn't result in the best teams advancing further in the competition. A KO format throughout the whole tournament would make seeding that much more important. Luck already plays too big a factor in the CL as it is, but then again the best sides usually overcome it.
The seedings for a KO stage in the Round of 32 would basically be teams from pots 1 and 2 being paired against clubs from pots 3 and 4. Here were the pots for the group stage draw for 2015-16. POT 1 (League champions) FC Barcelona Chelsea Bayern München Juventus Benfica Paris Saint-Germain Zenit St. Petersburg PSV Eindhoven POT 2 Real Madrid Atlético Madrid FC Porto Arsenal Manchester United Valencia Bayer Leverkusen Manchester City -------------------------------------------- POT 3 Shakhtar Donetsk Sevilla Olympique Lyon Dinamo Kiev Olympiakos Piraeus CSKA Moscow Galatasaray AS Roma POT 4 BATE Borisov Borussia Mönchengladbach VfL Wolfsburg Dinamo Zagreb Maccabi Tel-Aviv AA Gent Malmö FF FK Astana
Of course more matchdays equals more chance that the best teams get through/the cream rises to the top. But I'm going on the assumption that 2 group stages is not viable. The format I propose enhances the likelihood of winding-up with the best teams in the quarterfinals using the same number of matchdays as we have now. Using this season as an example again, Juve drew Bayern, which I think we'll all agree guarantees that one of the top 8 (top 5?) won't make the final 8. We're just lucky that PSG didn't draw Barca or else it would've been an even more watered-down quarterfinal round. If the round of 16 was a group-stage, sure Juve could have still drawn Bayern but they would have had every chance to advance to the QFs since the top 2 in each group would advance. But what if they drew both Bayern and Barca in their group, you ask? Well, those odds are exponentially lower than just drawing either Bayern or Barca in a knockout round. Like 1-in-15 (7%) versus 1-in-3 (33%).
It would be easy to improve the seedings though. That isn't even a problem. Team rankings should be a function of the league ranking and the team's ranking in that league, not how well the club did in Europe 5 years ago with completely different players. With an improved seeding system, you eliminate the chance of Barca drawing, say, Man City in the R32 knockout round because a team that finished 2nd in the 3rd best league wouldn't be unseeded (i.e. no logical ranking system places the #2 team in the #3 league outside the top 16).
64 clubs is a power of 2, but do you want 32 Europa League games every Group Stage matchday? Especially with only 16 clubs in the Champions League at that point, there would be several Europa League games with big clubs played at the same time. Let's say Leicester City finishes second in the Premier League. Based on their coefficient, they would be in Pot 4 for the Champions League Group Stage draw. Do you think they deserve to be in one of the top two pots in their first European competition in a long time? When was the last time (if ever) they competed in Europe? Therefore whether Leicester City finishes first or second or worse in the Premier League has a big impact on their Champions League hopes because being English champions would get them in Pot 1. The easiest draw an English Pot 4 club could have gotten in 2015-2016 based on the club coefficients was PSV Eindhoven (Pot 1, reached the Round of 16), Bayern Leverkusen (Pot 2, third in Group Stage, and now in Europa league Round of 16), and AS Roma (Pot 3, reached the Round of 16). Manchester City (who did better in the Champions League than Bayer Leverkusen) had the worst coefficient in Pot 2, but they can't be grouped with Leicester City in the Champions League.
I would get rid of the EL group-stage and just make it straight knockout all-the-way. Unless the group-stage generates lots of cash for these second- and third-tier clubs, in which case it would be worth keeping (but I doubt it does(?)). Leicester City is an extreme case. What we are witnessing right now literally never happened before and it may still not happen. No seeding system can take into account everything. My answer to their lack of pedigree in Europe would be: so what? Don't forget too that the current seeding system, even if Leicester City reached the CL semis next season, they would still be in pot 3 or 4 for the draw in the following season (if they qualified again). So its not like the current system even does a good job of ranking teams according to recent European success (entering this season, Valencia & Schalke were ranked ahead of Juventus, for instance ).
Groups benefit the better teams, because on the long run they will win. Knockouts benefit the worse teams, as they only have to win a 180 match to advance to the next stage. Groups mean that teams have a few guaranteed matches. Nobody wants to see multiple top teams lost in first or second round. But two group phases would let very little chance of upsets.
The two group stages only increases the number of games for the teams that advance. My assumption is that people want to see more top level matches anyways which is what a second group stage would provide. I do see your point though where in the second group stage it would have been possible for Juve/PSG to play two of Bayern/Barca/Real/Atleti. That would have been incredibly unlucky but as a fan that would introduce the possibility of some very savory match ups. At least we would see the best sides match up against each other more often than we do now. My preference would be to see Barca, Bayern, Juve, PSG, Atleti, whichever English side is top, Dortmund, etc play each other every year regardless of whether it's in a 2nd group stage or QF. It's a shame that one of Juve and Bayern will not progress to play such matches. If the second match plays out like the first, it would be essentially a SF tie in the R16 but with one of the teams not going on to have played vs other top sides.