Reunion in the new mode: Dortmund’s Julian Ryerson and Vinicius Jr. from Real Madrid meet again in the premier class.
Photo: imago/Ulrich Hufnagel
In Leverkusen, looking at the game schedule, one could almost have asked the question: Are we really playing the Champions League this year or was the reigning German champion mistakenly placed back in the Europa League? On Thursday – actually the matchday for the smaller European football competitions – the Werkself starts the European Cup at Feyenoord in Rotterdam at 6.45 p.m. The fact that this is actually a Champions League duel is due to one of many innovations with which the premier class of European football is entering the 2024/25 season.
In the future, every European cup will have an exclusive week at the start in which only games from the respective competition will be played. The Champions League anthem (which has also been slightly changed) will therefore not only be heard this Tuesday in the Santiago Bernabeu, when VfB Stuttgart returns to the European stage against record winners Real Madrid, and on Wednesday, when last year’s finalists Borussia Dortmund Belgium is visiting FC Bruges, but also on Thursday when Leverkusen face Feyenoord.
From the second matchday, the Champions League will return to its usual Tuesday and Wednesday dates. Nevertheless, further changes are coming. Gone are the days of the group phase: instead of 32 teams divided into groups of four, from which the first two teams qualify for the round of 16, from this season there will be a league mode with 36 teams.
It is UEFA’s attempt to generate even more money from football’s premier class. Due to the increase and the change to a league, there will be 64 more Champions League games in the future. This means more TV revenue and additional marketing opportunities. UEFA expects revenue to increase from two to almost 2.5 billion euros. Each club receives 18 million euros for participation alone. Each victory brings another two million. With this, UEFA also wants to put a stop to a possible Super League. Since 2021, some top European clubs have been threatening – sometimes louder, sometimes quieter – to set up their own league in order to be able to earn even more money. With the new Champions League format, UEFA wants to finally put an end to this idea.
During the league phase, each Champions League team will therefore play eight games instead of the previous six. Each team has four home and four away games against eight different opponents. There are no longer any return games in the preliminary round. Who plays against whom is primarily decided by the Uefa club coefficient – another concession to Europe’s top clubs, who can expect easier league opponents due to their good coefficient. Since this year, the complicated draw of the match pairings has been carried out by specially developed software. The days when veteran football legends stirred around in glass lottery pots, unscrewed small footballs and held up pieces of paper to the camera are now a thing of the past, at least in the preliminary round.
As teams with a high coefficient, Bayern Munich and Dortmund in particular were able to enjoy feasible games in the league phase. The Munich team will also travel to Barcelona to reunite with former coach Hansi Flick. In addition to easier opponents, Borussia also has a new edition of last year’s final against Real Madrid. RB Leipzig and Leverkusen, on the other hand, have to face Liverpool, Inter Milan and Atlético Madrid in the preliminary round. In addition to Real, Stuttgart will also face Juventus Turin, Europa League winner Atalanta Bergamo and, on the last matchday of the league phase, Paris Saint-Germain.
The end of the preliminary round offers several innovations. Because there will be eight instead of six preliminary round matchdays in the future, it will not be clear until January 2025 who will make it to the knockout phase of the Champions League. Until last season, the teams knew before Christmas whether they had made it into the top 16 teams in Europe, but in the future the last two league match days will not be played until after the turn of the year. The last match day in particular is tough. On Wednesday, January 29th, all 18 games will take place simultaneously at 9 p.m. This is to prevent teams from not giving their best in the final game because they can already predict what position they will occupy in the final table of the league phase based on previous results. This is crucial for moving forward.
A total table of all 36 participants is created from the eight games played in the league. While the first eight teams are guaranteed a place in the round of 16, the teams in places nine to 24 will compete against each other in two play-off games to determine the other round of 16 teams. For all teams from 25th place onwards, the European Cup season is finally over. There is no longer a “relegation” to the Europa League.
From the round of 16 onwards, the new Champions League will look much more familiar again. Thanks to the new tournament tree, the teams in first and second place from the league phase can only meet again in the final. Otherwise, all knockout games will be played as usual with home and away games until the final, which will take place on May 31st in Munich.
Despite all the innovations, UEFA also has a small improvement in store for the fans. After major protests last season, the prices for guest tickets are to be capped this season. In the Champions League, away fans will in future have to pay a maximum of 60 euros instead of the previous 70 euros. In the coming season, the upper limit will be lowered to 50 euros. Of course, these price limits do not apply to the final in Munich.
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