WE ARE just one week into the Champions League first stage proper and already it feels like the new format has largely fallen flat.
Tonight’s 0-0 draw between Atalanta and Arsenal was the latest in a series of opening-round matches that felt like exhibition games.
With over 20 minutes (including stoppage time) remaining and the game scoreless, Mikel Arteta substituted Bukayo Saka.
Had it been a match the Gunners needed to win, it seems unlikely the manager would have made this move.
The visitors registered just two shots on target in the 90 minutes and seemed happy enough with the 0-0 draw.
The relative apathy and lack of intensity often on display this week is not a new phenomenon.
For years, the early stages of the Champions League have felt like a non-event.
In the old group-stage format, you could usually predict with at least a 90% accuracy the teams who would advance to the next round.
Supporters of sides like Man City and Liverpool may have enjoyed seeing their teams routinely demolish patently weaker outfits. But casual fans or neutrals would have been tempted to tune out of this formality and belatedly start paying attention during the knockout stages.
So change was needed, but the revamped Champions League only exacerbates the original problem.
Firstly, a summary of how it works.
Each team plays eight games — four home and four away — against different sides from other countries.
The results count towards a 36-team table.
24 of the 36 clubs will advance to the knockout stages.
The top eight will advance directly to the last 16.
The 16 below them will play an extra game in the knockout phase play-offs, with the top eight of that group having the advantage of being seeded.
According to Sky Sports’ calculations, nine points or three wins out of eight fixtures will give teams a 69% chance of finishing in the top 24 and thereby staying in the competition.
So don’t expect Arsenal or Man City to lose sleep over their sub-par performances or dropped points in their opening games this week.
Both teams certainly played with one eye on the much more important Premier League encounter against each other at the weekend.
Given that upcoming opponents include Shakhtar Donetsk, Dinamo Zagreb, Slovan Bratislava and Sparta Prague, these two English sides should still comfortably have enough to secure the nine points or more required to advance.
Uefa may argue that the new format aims to reduce the number of meaningless games in the competition’s early stage.
But according to Opta, 10 points will virtually guarantee a team’s progress to the next round.
So a side who wins their first four games could conceivably rest their best XI for the remaining four games.
By contrast, in the previous group-stage format, there were usually only two games at most where they were afforded that luxury.
Another argument in favour of the current format is that top sides will face each other more often in the early stages of the competition, in what is presumably a concession to all those big European clubs who at one stage or another in recent years were planning on joining a now-aborted breakaway European Super League.
But as this week has emphasised, these games lack the tension of knockout matches and will often end in draws, with teams safe in the knowledge that they have easier fixtures to come where they can comfortably pick up wins.
Yet regardless of the format Uefa decides on for the Champions League, the same basic problem will remain.
Unlike in the European Cup era or the inception of the Champions League in the early 1990s, as it stands, there are at best a handful of teams who can realistically hope to prevail.
The idea of a club outside the so-called big-five European leagues triumphing — like Ajax in 1995 or Porto in 2004 — seems highly improbable if not impossible now.
In the past 14 seasons, only teams from three countries have been crowned champions — Spain (8), England (4) and Germany (2).
And of that group, only six teams are represented: Real Madrid (6), Liverpool, Man City, Chelsea (2), Barcelona (2) and Bayern Munich (2).
Unless another mega-rich club PSG finally get their act together, a winner will likely emerge from one of those three countries again this year.
And beyond the clubs mentioned (barring the ineligible Chelsea of course), you could make a case for Arsenal, Atletico Madrid, Inter Milan (the last non-Spanish-German-or-English team to win) or Bayer Leverkusen, but the rest are there to make up the numbers.
So the deeper problems at the heart of football mean the format essentially doesn’t matter — the widening financial chasm between the privileged few and everyone else will ensure the early stages remain a formality.
The changes, however, will mean more matches played in the competition proper this season, rising from 125 to 189.
And that is surely the biggest motivation from Uefa’s perspective, with additional revenue to be earned and threats of strike action from overworked players continuing to be ignored.
