Reason for my question is clear: two Italian teams in the Champions League Final. The CL Final is the second biggest soccer final of the world after the WC final (by number of nations that cover it on TV). The problem now is that two teams of one country are not interesting for a huge number of fans. Soccer is emotion and as any sports it lives by the fact that you can root for a team - except for Italians and maybe foreign fans of Serie A this won't be really possible. In Germany - a soccer crazy country - the CL is live on free TV on Wednesdays and one of the big five channels has the rights; when Inter met Milan they already saw this problem and sold the rights to a small sports channel as they knew that just any old movie would bring them higher ratings, and indeed the ratings were lousy. But after all this was just the semifinal and the all important final is threatened by the same problems. So, the question is: Is it time to introduce an US-pro-league-like conference mode that avoids a one nation only final? It could happen in two possible ways: geographical criteria (=North+West and South+East Conference) or sportive criteria (UEFA ranking: 1,4,5,8,9,12,13,16... and 2,3,6,7,10,11,14,15... in one conference).
That's an interesting idea, but with all the care that they take to make sure that same country teams don't meet in the earlier stages, I think it is a matter of weighing the consequences against the risks. By trying one of your suggestions, I would think that it would be inevitable that same country teams would meet, perhaps many times in the earlier rounds. So the question would be whether they would accept the certainty of it happening earlier to avoid the possibility of it happening in the semi-final or final. I don't know. Television money is what drives CL, so you hate to see rights owners get burned and decide not to bid as high the next year.
...another reason to shape the CL into the old European Cup schedule with only league champions qualified from each UEFA member.
The aim is to have the best teams in the final, if people aren't interested then that is their shortcoming not that of the game.
There should be seeding, so that Man United and Real Madrid at least had the chance to meet in the final.
There was seedings. That's why MU met Real Madrid in the quarterfinal. Real Madrid qualified second in their group..... MU was first in their group.... of course, no team from the same country plays each other in the quarterfinal rule paired them together.
I don't see the problem. This year it just turned out this way. It might just as well have been Valencia - Ajax and Juve - Real in the semi's. Bad idea.