In the Champions League, less might not necessarily be more

Thankfully, Nicky Hayen has a natural gift for mime. The circumstances in which the Club Brugge manager finds himself trying to communicate with his squad are not ideal. The stands of the Jan Breydelstadion are still packed. The noise is loud enough that it feels like there is a non-zero chance that the whole place, a concrete hulk held together by convention and hope, might crumble.

A few minutes after the final whistle has blown on his team’s win against Sporting CP, he has gathered his players around him in a tight circle for an immediate post-game debrief. They are glowing with sweat and victory, their arms draped over each other’s shoulders. Even at close quarters, most instinctively lean forward, straining to hear their manager over the din.

His gestures, though, are emphatic enough to make his message abundantly clear. At various moments, he points at the players themselves, at the jubilant fans, at the glistening turf: this is who you are, this is what you have done, this is where you belong. He clenches his fists and raises his arms in triumph, the signal to his players that they might start to bounce, dance, and spray water bottles in lieu of champagne.

Hayen, in other words, does not seem to believe that this game, this win, lacked meaning.

The same is true of both Brugge’s players and their euphoric public. His squad remain on the pitch for another 10 minutes or so after Hayen’s impromptu team meeting is joyously concluded. There is a full lap of honour. They pause in front of Brugge’s ultras to commune with their fans. Casper Nielsen, the scorer of the winning goal, is given the privilege of acting as choirmaster and conductor.

In the year or so since its inception and the three months since its debut, a view has taken hold that the sprawling new format of the Champions League — with its endless stream of games and its blurred lines and its extendable, flyleaf table — has turned what was once football’s most revered club competition into an etiolated, ersatz version of itself.

The tournament, the theory goes, is now bloated almost beyond repair, its drama diluted and its jeopardy confected. Each game is inherently disposable, taking place in a vacuum of meaning, unmoored from the competition as a whole, a sort of landfill football, staged for the sake of being staged, every single one of them a waymarker on the game’s journey from sport to cynical, money-spinning content-delivery pipeline.

All of that may be true, of course. As the Jan Breydelstadion sang the praises of Hayen and his players, it looked an awful lot like nobody had bothered to tell Club Brugge.

That the new format of the Champions League has its roots in the bottomless greed — and self-serving cowardice of the cartel of Premier League powerhouses and continental aristocrats who have long confused their self-interest with that of the game as a whole — is not really in question.

The ‘Swiss model’, as it was labelled, was first endorsed by UEFA as a way to mollify the game’s permanently restless grandees, to ensure they felt the Champions League was working for them. It is only somewhat ironic, then, that much of the work on its design happened at almost exactly the same time as a dozen of those clubs were also busy working on their short-lived, ill-fated breakaway Super League.

The two projects were not, were never, all that different. Europe’s elite wanted to make more money. That meant, essentially, playing both more games and, crucially, more games between themselves.

In the aftermath of the Super League’s collapse, one executive at a mutineer club — who, like all sources in this article, asked to remain anonymous to protect their relationships — privately admitted to being sincerely confused by what he perceived as disconnect between what fans said they wanted and what the data seemed to suggest they actually want.

The showpiece encounters between the game’s great houses that ordinarily make up the latter stages of the Champions League are incredibly popular. What was nefarious about wanting to play them more frequently? It is a logic best expressed by the pastiche television presenter Alan Partridge’s attitude to regional detective dramas: people like them, let’s make more of them.

Gianluigi Buffon, left, and Cristiano Ronaldo, right, at August’s league phase draw (Valery Hache/AFP via Getty Images)

This format was supposed to meet that demand. But at the same time, as it grew numerically, it was designed to shrink geographically. Initially, some clubs proposed the introduction of legacy places, spots reserved for previous winners regardless of whether they actually qualified. UEFA and European Leagues, the umbrella body that represents all of Europe’s domestic championships, pushed back on that successfully. It was, one executive involved in those discussions said, little more than a way of protecting the major Italian teams, in particular, from their own shortcomings.

The compromise came in the form of two ‘coefficient places’, spots reserved for teams from those leagues that performed best across Europe’s three competitions in the previous season: a more palatable option, but nevertheless an obvious sop to the same vested interests. The Champions League group stage now contains 36 teams. The major five leagues provide 22 of them.

The result has been a competition that has felt, at times, unwieldy and inelegant and exhausting. As Carlo Ancelotti (among many others) warned, the extra fixtures have placed an additional physical burden on the players. “It might be more entertaining than last year,” the Real Madrid manager said in a press conference before the tournament had even started. “But the schedule is too demanding.” A glance at his injury-ravaged squad would suggest he was right.

Liverpool beat Real Madrid last month – but did it feel like a high-stakes clash? (Justin Setterfield/Getty Images)

It has been, by turns, both too predictable and too forgiving. At one end: the top 14 teams in the table all come from Europe’s major leagues. At the other: it is entirely possible that Manchester City will qualify despite drawing at home with Inter and Feyenoord, and losing at both Sporting and Juventus.

It is that sense — that every trapdoor might also be an escape hatch — that has perhaps proved the greatest flaw in the new system. What has marked the first six rounds of games is a widespread uncertainty over what any of it means.

To an extent, that is inevitable: the first few steps into a new world are always tentative. Pep Guardiola said before his City team’s second fixture that he did not know “exactly how you handle” the new format. By the end of November, his Bayern Munich counterpart Vincent Kompany was still refusing to look at the table. “I don’t really understand it yet,” he said following Bayern’s 1-0 win over Paris Saint-Germain.

Six games in, it is still difficult to discern the precise meaning of any of the individual games we have seen. Even the most rarefied fixtures, the ones the elite were so convinced would be so appealing, have come to seem ephemeral, indistinct. Was Inter’s point at Manchester City good? Probably! Was Barcelona’s win against Borussia Dortmund important? Let’s see! Is it bad that Real Madrid lost to Liverpool? Maybe!

It is not only the grand clubs of Europe who make the mistake of assuming their experience is paramount. There is a tendency, for fans, media and the game’s authorities alike, to look at the state of the Champions League primarily through the eyes of those teams who expect to spend most time in it. That perspective, though, is incomplete.

Club Brugge, for example, have competed in 13 previous editions of the Champions League this century. They have qualified for the knockout rounds a grand total of once (in 2022-23). Sporting’s record is a little better: they have made it twice. Neither has suffered quite as much as Dinamo Zagreb, who have had 20 attempts at the tournament since the turn of the millennium, and never made it past the groups.

In the old model, they — and many more like them — found themselves caught in what Brendan Rodgers, the Celtic manager, has referred to as the “Pot four trap,” a self-fulfilling prophecy in which teams from outside the major leagues found the odds stacked against them from the moment the draw for the group phase was made. “You had more top teams in your group, and you knew you had six difficult games,” Hayen said after his team’s visit to Celtic Park on November 27.

The effect has been to set them free. “Now it’s one game,” Hayen said. “It gives you a little bit more of a chance.” Rodgers has suggested that even teams cast as underdogs might be a little more adventurous against the great and good in one-off games.

That, certainly, seems to be how it has played out. Brugge now have 10 points. Hayen did not want to tempt fate — “we are not qualified mathematically,” he said after the win against Sporting — but he did concede that, based on the club’s pre-tournament calculations, his side may already have enough for a spot in the play-off round.

Sporting, Feyenoord, Celtic and PSV are all close. Even Dinamo, who started their campaign with a 9-2 defeat to Bayern, have hope: Croatia’s permanent champions currently occupy 24th place, the last qualifying spot. Lille and Brest, two French sides whose finances are more in line with those of Sporting than PSG, have thrived, too.

Sporting CP defeated Manchester City 4-1 in November (Filipe Amorim/AFP via Getty Images)

They are not the only ones revelling in this new landscape. Regardless of the format, Aston Villa’s return to the top seat of European football for the first time in more than four decades would have turned their games into spectacles, but their manager, Unai Emery, has welcomed the accelerated education this version offers. “I like it,” he said. “We have more options to correct mistakes.”

There has, in other words, been no one universal experience of this iteration of the Champions League; it is not possible to assert that some, all or none of the games have a prescribed level of meaning. How much a game matters to a club is entirely bespoke.

Bild, the German newspaper, described Bayern’s win against PSG as a druckspiel, a pressure game, because of the course of the club’s season. Real Madrid, like City and PSG, have found themselves forced to take all of their games rather more seriously than might have been anticipated. The impact of each defeat might have been limited but the number of teams who might benefit from a misstep has grown exponentially.

“This format means everyone has to pay more attention,” Diego Simeone, the Atletico Madrid manager, said before his team’s game against Sparta Prague last month, after witnessing his team lose two of their first three games. “There’s more pressure to win, because you’re up against everyone else.”

All of this was unforeseen. The game’s megaliths did not redesign the Champions League to empower the minnows. But an unintended consequence is a consequence nonetheless; there is a pleasing irony as some of the perpetrators of the change struggle, those they had hoped to lock out still further have found the new reality to their liking.

Not everything is perfect: there are plenty in scouting departments who resent the extra workload; one club, placed among the lower seeds, felt a slightly underwhelming draw reduced their chances of benefiting commercially from a rare appearance in the tournament.

But it does not feel, in those corners of the competition where the light shines just a little less brightly, as though none of it matters as much. In Brugge, certainly, the competition does not seem to be fading in relevance, in meaning, as though it now exists only as a shadow of what it once was: nothing more than a stream of hollow content.

“I’m really proud of the team,” Hayen said, once he had recovered his composure, his team now a draw, a win, a game away from the rarefied heights of the knockout rounds of the Champions League. “We will keep our feet on the ground but we also really have to enjoy this. Sometimes you don’t enjoy such moments enough.”

(Additional reporting: Oliver Kay, Dermot Corrigan, Michael Walker, Greg O’Keeffe, Jacob Tanswell, Sam Lee and James Horncastle)

(Photos: Getty Images; design: Dan Goldfarb)