We are still only two gameweeks into the new 36-team, one-group UEFA Champions League format, but it has already caused quite a stir.
Change can be difficult to process for soccer fans, especially to longstanding mechanisms in the game, and this latest one has been seismic. In fact, it has ripped up the very fabric of the competition. Whether you like or hate the changes at this early stage, everyone can agree that it still feels a bit weird. But the key question is whether the pushback we’re seeing from fans is a product of typical, initial resistance that will eventually soften, or something deeper.
Here, we’ll take each of the major criticisms that we’ve seen levelled at the new tournament format (which you can see explained here) and try to assess whether they are truly valid, or just a signal of unfamiliarity that will eventually become accepted as time wears on.
For some teams, it has been a brutal start. In the first 36 games, there have been nine wins by a margin of 4+ goals (and there were eight in the first 27 games), which dwarves the numbers we’ve seen in the last five editions of the Champions League across the first two matchdays (two, four, four, five, three). This has led to suggestions that the new format has become less competitive, but there’s a couple of things worth bearing in mind here.
First, two gameweeks is a very small sample size. You can get hints from them, but rarely is it advisable to draw conclusions — anyone who works with data would call you mad for doing so. Second, the teams we’ve namechecked on the wrong end of these scorelines are no strangers to this sort of thing.
Take Croatian side Dinamo Zagreb. They finished last in their group in 2022-23, and last in 2019-20. They qualified for the 2016-17 edition and didn’t score a single goal, while conceding 15 to Lyon, Juventus and Sevilla. The year before that, they beat Arsenal 2-1, but lost 3-0, 2-0, 5-0, 1-0 and 2-1 in the other games.
Young Boys have also perfected the art of finishing bottom of a Champions League group, doing so the last two times they qualified in 2021-22 and 2018-19. While Serbia’s Crvena Zvezda, who were beaten 10-2 over two games against PSG in 2018-19, lost their group games by an aggregate score of 9-0 to Bayern and Tottenham in 2019-20. Even Celtic, an iconic European name, finished bottom of their group the last three times they’ve qualified before this season, twice conceding 15 times across their six games and losing 9-0 on aggregate in both games against Barcelona.
All of this is to show, in the context of the scale of European football, that the good teams are still good, and the bad teams are still bad. And bad teams have always been present in the Champions League.
Yes, scorelines have flared up earlier than usual this season, and it will be interesting to see if that’s simply a small sample size or indicative of the fact the tournament has grown from 32 to 36 teams this year, widening the depth of talent from top to bottom. But in the entirety of the group stage in 2022-23, there were 16 thrashings by 4+ goals, and 14 the year before that, — so we’ll have to see if the trend continues.
As with any dataset, there have also been some anomalies. Young Boys, who are 36th in the UCL table with a -8 goal difference, won the Swiss Super League in 2024 and beat Galatasaray over two legs in qualifying, but are bizarrely bottom of their domestic league this year with just six points from nine games. So you would expect their form to turn around at some point. Meanwhile, included in the list of nine 4+ winning margins so far is Benfica’s 4-0 destruction of Spain’s third-best team Atlético Madrid. Nobody would have predicted that result before the game. So this might be the biggest clue of all that we’d be wise to wait and see what unfolds before rushing to judgement.