I never liked it, for many reasons which I expressed in several occasions in these forums, but above all what I dislike about it is the fact that what I enjoyed the most, the thrill of a tournament in which the winner goes on, and the loser goes home, i.e. you cannot lose any challenge, it is gone.
I want to see possible, for instance, for Malmoe to eliminate Inter, and for Lokomotiv to eliminate Napoli, in early rounds. And I want to see the destiny of a club to be always in such club hands, not in third parties hands, in a cup competition.
There are championships, played with double round robin.
There are cups, played with knock out systems.
To make an hybrid, a mix and match, has zero appeal to me.
Plymouth Argyle yesterday made 0 0 vs. Liverpool in FA cup. Today this is big news. And suddenly everybody cares about the FA cup, all around Europe. Five years from now, people will remember that match more easily than any match of this CL GS. I think that this should make people think. You need big names to make a cup valuable, but you need such big names to risk an elimination, and bunches of different outsider challengers to make it interesting.
Moreover, no other club, with its performances, can now influence the output of the re match between these two.
When I hear some club presidents speaking with enthusiasm about an under project top European competition which should be made out only of German, English, Spanish, Italian and French sides, I can't help thinking about what the football history would have lost in such way: Ajax, Benfica, Red Star, and so on.
And this is not about romanticism, it is about pragmatism as well. How long will, a competition in which you can lose and continue to play (no dramatic upsets), in which we all realized the matches year after year feature pretty much the same exact protagonists, leaving each the competition at some pretty much predicable stage, be interesting long term? Autumn Uefa football can really be reduced to, more or less, a bunch of European friendlies between big names from major leagues, which generates lots of TV income, for many years to come, and never lose interest, and keep on gaining potential market?
I see some possible evolutions long term:
1. I'm in minority, and the majority of people do prefer this kind of hybrid format, which is neither a cup nor a league, and this we will keep;
2. the appeal for the novelty of many clashes between giants from top league since the early stages of the competition will end, soon or later, the TV revenues will drop, and sometimes in future the format will go back to a pure KO system for the whole competition.
3. no matter what, an elite closed Super League will eventually be formed, adopting a more or less pure round robin system competition model across the major countries (club football wise) of Europe. That's the future of the top level European football competition, with or without Uefa direct involvement.
What are your opinions?
Cheers!
