New Champions League looks suspiciously like a back door European Super League

Nobody wanted the ‘Swiss model’ which will reduce jeopardy, reward failure and create more dead rubbers

Open wide for the revamped ­Champions League group stage, all 144 games of it. Today’s draw will honour Cristiano Ronaldo, the competition’s all-time leading ­goalscorer, for now. His record will likely be broken given this expanded format which nobody asked for and nobody wants, apart from those it will enrich.
The new set-up replaces eight groups of four playing six games each with a mega league of 36 teams playing eight times, home and away, against eight different clubs. This is being called “the Swiss model”, not a footballer’s new romantic interest from Instagram but a format developed in Switzerland for chess tournaments to arrange a large field into a league.
Chess fans, keen to distance themselves from a dud, have pointed out that their version helps to pit equally matched opponents against one another, the sort of high-mindedness absent from these plans. The top eight go through automatically while the teams from ninth to 24th enjoy two-legged play-offs before we finally reach the round of 16.
So no groups as we know them, just teams playing a selection from various seeded pots. Inevitably this means more of the bigger teams playing one another in high-prestige, low-stakes games. It will take nearly 150 matches to thin the field from 36 to 24. If that all sounds like it reduces jeopardy, rewards failure, creates more dead rubbers and helps the giants of European football hang on to their hegemony then you are on the right track.
What was that, four paragraphs 200-odd words? It would only work as an elevator pitch if heading to the top of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, your Champions League final venue for 2031.
Football loves to expand, ideally while adding needless complexity. The result is this, sport as designed by the Andrea True Connection: “More, more, more / how do you like it, how do you like it?” A: It does not matter, the broadcasters are delighted.
Of course, the old-fashioned group stage stirs certain feelings. Sturm Graz v Energy Drink Leipzig, Benfica, always there, never really doing anything, brave Celtic pulling one back at the Bernabeu on their way to a 5-1 defeat.Who among us has not wished for more of this sort of thing? Perhaps those who can remember the experiment with a second group stage from 1999-2003, which prolonged the slog by a further six games.
That was rightly shelved but those steering the sport cannot resist tinkering for long. What is it about men in power and wanting to be fathers of things? Gianni Infantino seems to see VAR as his enduring contribution to the game, hanging his hat on it as if they award a Nobel prize for misery. Sepp Blatter took the World Cup to Africa but will be remembered instead as the bloke looking nonplussed by a gale of dollar bills around his head.
Aleksander Ceferin says the new format, also in force for the Europa and Conference Leagues, will mean “greater fairness, excitement, intensity, emotion and uncertainty”. Usually people making such bold claims ask for time to see how things shake out. In this case it seems unnecessary because ­everyone knows where this is heading.
Boredom, as qualifiers are settled long before the eighth round of fixtures. Silence from managers now but complaints about scheduling as soon as they are forced to play a domestic game at an inconvenient time. The inevitable death of the League Cup. All for what? A witless expansion which looks alarmingly like the Super League entering via the backdoor, surrounded by bouncers.
Ask fans what they would like the Champions League to look like and you would expect support for a return to the old European Cup ­format. A 32-team straight knockout over two-legged ties, unseeded and ideally on free-to-air TV. This adds scarcity, maintains jeopardy and might result in the odd final which does not include Manchester City or Real Madrid. It could work commercially, too. Put it on YouTube and the audience would increase tenfold. Thus more eyes for the adverts, a stronger brand and lasting relevance.
Just once would it not be wonderful to see a downsizing ­experiment like this trialled in ­reality? Yes, it is a risk, and on the spreadsheets a guaranteed increasing number is replaced by a ­question mark. But it could be exciting, beloved and still plenty lucrative. Instead we have this mess.