Waleed Aly
Columnist, co-host of Ten’s The Project and academic
At 7am on Thursday (AEDT), 18 games in a single competition, featuring some of the best soccer clubs in the world, will kick off simultaneously right across Europe.
In England and Spain and Germany. In Italy and Croatia and France. In Portugal and the Netherlands and Switzerland and Austria. Everyone. Everywhere. All at once.
Kylian Mbappe and PSG will be in action on Thursday morning along with the other 35 teams in the Champions League.Credit: Getty
It will be one of the most remarkable days of the sporting year; a wild feature of the new format of the UEFA Champions League: the world’s most prestigious club soccer competition in which the best teams in Europe play each other.
Thursday is – to adopt a crude analogy – the last day of the home-and-away season, in which teams are eliminated and finals positions are determined. Until this year, the Champions League did this much in the manner of the World Cup: teams sorted into groups of four, two of which progress to the knockout phase. This year that all changed.
Now, instead of groups, we have a single monstrous league, made up of 36 teams, listed in one set of standings. Each team has eight matches to secure their place in the knockout phase, but those who make it do not qualify as equals. The top eight go straight to the last 16.
Teams nine to 24 have to play an extra two-legged knockout round to get to that stage. Meanwhile, the top two are seeded for the rest of the tournament.
Intricate details aside, there are two main consequences. First: where you finish matters. In a sport where upsets happen and the big teams already play an exhausting number of games, finishing in the top eight and skipping a round is a big advantage. In a 36-team league, top eight is not simple. For context, such giants as Bayern Munich, Real Madrid and Juventus occupy spots 15-17 with only one match left.
The second is that all the games in this last round must happen simultaneously to avoid collusion. It has been thus since an infamous West Germany v Austria game in the 1982 World Cup. Earlier results meant both teams knew going in that they could both advance if West Germany won by a goal or two. So, once West Germany scored early, they played out a ghost of a match – quite deliberately – in which nothing happened.
A West German caller refused to commentate the game any further. An Austrian commentator told viewers to turn off their televisions. This game, known as the “Disgrace of Gijon” is the reason the final game in each group is always played simultaneously in major tournaments.
But with a single league – effectively one big group – the only option is a shotgun start that rings right across the continent. And then, pandemonium. Juventus, for example, will be hoping to jump nine spots up the table in a single game and into the last 16. And incredibly, they can. They are 17th, but the table is so tight that they are a single point behind eighth. Indeed, the gap between eighth and 24th is three points. One win.
That’s it.
Juventus are hoping to go rocketing up the table on Thursday.Credit: Getty Images
Now imagine how it will be on Thursday morning when 18 games are going at once to sort this out. Imagine the “live ladder”. A goal here and Juventus have jumped 10 places. A goal there and Dynamo Zagreb have sent AC Milan tumbling out of the top eight and shunted Paris Saint-Germain into the elimination spots. It promises to be the most glorious kind of chaos.
Clearly, no other sport has the scale to replicate this, much less the relatively provincial football codes that dominate Australia. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing for us to pinch.
Consider the AFL and NRL. Both share an eight-team finals system replete with incentives. Top two is a major prize: a home ride to the grand final. Top four is a double chance. Top six gets you a home final. Top eight speaks for itself. It may not be 17 teams separated by a single win, but it’s very often tight, the prizes varied and the permutations usually many.
And yet we waste this by largely scheduling the final round like any other: games spanning as early as Thursday to Sunday, with the Sunday fixtures live or dead depending on what has come before. Best-case scenario, a team will know it needs victory, sometimes by a certain margin. That’s fun, but it’s not wild.
It’s a single equation when we could instead have complex algebra in real time.
We should be firing this shotgun for ourselves. Every match at, say, 7pm eastern, 5pm in WA. It would work especially well in the NRL, where less scoring makes each try seismic and the prevalence of more suburban grounds makes fixturing simple. But in the AFL it would still work brilliantly. We’ve just seen a season of huge momentum shifts within games. Imagine a seven-goal blitz that completely changes calculations: two games in Queensland, two in Sydney, two in Melbourne, one each in Perth and Adelaide, then add Hobart or Geelong. The result would be an extraordinary all-day build-up, endless discussion of every possible scenario. Butterflies in countless Australian stomachs at the same time.
Fans would watch their team, then realise their fate is being decided elsewhere. There’s a roar at Suncorp Stadium because someone scored a try at Brookvale. A growing hum at the MCG because something is brewing in Adelaide. And the television coverage – imagine. Every game streamed and a main channel switching to wherever the action is most vital at any given moment, for instance. It’s the perfect scenario: a throwback to pre-’90s footy, when matches were pretty much simultaneous every week, but updated for the age of multi-screens and overflowing “content”.
The day will be an event all its own. A kind of home-and-away grand final day. An adornment for our sporting calendar.
Surely, it’s worth a shot.
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