SuperChampions, the wall to avoid the European Super League

In another article we talked about the idea of the most important European football clubs in creating a parallel competition governed by an organization other than UEFA, thus generating even more income. This idea has been in the minds of the people all over Europe for more than 20 years and with the delicate financial situation that the pandemic has created, it has resurfaced. This is the very short version of the history of the European Super League.

The creation of this tournament can have serious consequences for national and even international competitions, with UEFA being one of the main losers as they could lose many sponsors and viewers. Logically, when threatened, UEFA has joined the European Clubs Association (ECA) to prepare a new project that will convince the main promoters of the European Super League to desist in the creation of this competition.

Hence the so-called SuperChampions, which is nothing more than a new format for the UEFA Champions League that would have national implications. The idea of this new format is to decrease the number of matches in national association tournaments such as leagues and cups and to increase the number of matches in the UEFA Champions League group stage. UEFA and the ECA, with the support of FIFA (which does not support the European Super League), propose to reduce about 4 rounds in the national cups (Copa del Rey, FA Cup, League Cup, DFB Pokal, etc.) and reduce the number of participants in the first tier of the European leagues to 16-18 teams, decreasing the number of matches at the national level.

On the other hand, the group stage of the UEFA Champions League, would remain with 32 clubs although the distribution of the groups would change to 4 groups of 8 participants each. This would ensure that each participating team would play at least 14 games (they would face the other 7 clubs in the group as home and away), which represents a huge increase in economic income compared to the current format, recalling that, currently, 6 games are played in the group stage. Another modification would be that the UEFA Champions League matches would be played on weekends, which would leave the matches of the national competitions for the weekdays, which would be a loss of attendees to the stadiums for the league and cup matches, once the social distancing situation is normalized.

The new format of the UEFA Champions League would be a great incentive for clubs that want to form the European Super League to abandon that idea, however, it would be pending that the national associations support a change that can be a severe blow for them. Basically, UEFA is doing with the national associations the same thing that the promoters of the European Super League wanted to do with them.