What Is Wrong With the Champions League?

UEFA is furiously remixing its flagship competition for next season, possibly to ward off the Super League.

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It’s hard to believe anyone watching David Raya spring to his left to claw away multiple Porto penalties and drag Arsenal into the Champions League quarterfinals last night thought to themselves, “This competition needs an immediate reboot.”

The first save in particular, where the Spaniard went full extension to paw one onto the post, was spectacular. The match-winner—to deny the same Galeno who’d beaten him from distance with the seconds ticking down in the first leg down in Portugal—was poetic. There was 41-year-old Pepe strutting around the Emirates Stadium on (maybe) his one last ride in Europe’s premier competition. There was managerial beef between Mikel Arteta and Sérgio Conceição, a subplot in what was overall an incredibly bitter cup tie between teams with contrasting philosophies and very different levels of financial power. It was, despite just two goals scored over upwards of 215 minutes, a classic.

Raya celebrated with a knee slide like he scored the winning goal—which he kind of did.

But back to the revisions, because UEFA made it known this week that the changes to the Champions League next season are being gradually unveiled. First, it was the new Group Stage format. Gone is the famous draw where four teams are thrown into a group and instructed to tear each other apart over six matches, playing everybody home and away. Next season, the tournament will be expanded from 32 to 36 teams, all of whom will be thrown in one league—finally, the competition earns its name—where each team will play eight matches.

The process of deciding which matches they’ll play is impressively complicated, so much so that UEFA now admits they’ll have to scrap the traditional draw where legendary players scoop someone’s name out of the pot and announce they’re about to get bludgeoned by Real Madrid. It would apparently take “up to four hours and require up to 900 balls” to do it the current way, ESPN tells us, so from next season it will be heavily computerized. UEFA assures us that its systems are audited by Ernst & Young for fairness, which will surely be sufficient for football fans when the computer spits out the news that they’re about to get bludgeoned by Real Madrid.

But that’s not all!