UEFA Changes 2024/2025 Champions League Format, Here Are the Pros and Cons

Jakarta, Todaysgist.com – The big European club football competition, the 2024/2025 Champions League has started. However, there is something different this season.

Previously, only 32 teams competed to advance to the next round. However, this season it has increased to 36 teams. The new format has also been officially implemented by UEFA in the Champions League. The aim is to increase the tightness of the matches and competition between elite European clubs.

UEFA made changes to the preliminary round. Previously, 32 teams were divided into eight groups. Each group consisted of four teams and played six home and away matches. The group stage qualified the 16 group winners and runners-up. Eight matches were played home and away to produce eight teams that would compete in the quarter-finals, semifinals and final. The round of 16 to the semifinals were also played home and away, while in the final there was only one match.

In the new Champions League format, 36 teams will be in one big standings. Each team will play eight matches, consisting of four home games and four away games with different opponents. The determination of opponents is based on seeding pots consisting of four pots with nine teams in each pot.

Next, each club will face two different opponents in different pots or as many as eight different opponents from four different pots. Thus, a club in the preliminary phase will not meet the same opponent.

In this season’s new format, the top eight clubs will advance directly to the round of 16. Then, clubs ranked 9th to 24th must enter the play-off round to compete for the remaining eight places in the round of 16.

Furthermore, in the last 16 of this season’s Champions League, each club will compete in two legs, namely home and away, as in the previous format.

The advantage of this new format is that each match has the potential to greatly affect a club’s chances of advancing to the next phase, while making every match important until the end. This is different from the previous format which left less meaningful matches at the end of the group phase because it was already clear which clubs had the best chance of advancing or being eliminated.

However, there are also disadvantages to this new format. The bottom eight teams ranked 25th to 36th are declared ineligible or eliminated. These eight teams will not play in the Europa League which is the second tier of club competition in Europe.