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  • "Platini considering scrapping Europa League in favour of extending Champions League"

I am against a two-tier Champs League as suggested by Burnsy. The 2nd tier would effectively be just a rebranded Europa League. The fact is money has changed the game, and we can forget about the romantic days of European Cup, Cup Winners Cup and UEFA Cup. Nobody cares about 2nd tier tournaments.

Some thoughts on execution
1) Make it exciting early on in the season by having a few knockout rounds that bring the teams down to 32 teams. This would mean involving the champions of Italy, England, Spain etc in at least one round of knockouts. To appease the big teams, you can seed 8 of them to ensure they all end up on the top half of the draw.
2) Remove / reduce country protections. If 5 teams make it through from England, there should be no problem with letting Chelsea and Liverpool knock each out in the group stages. If they can knock each other out in April, why not in December?
3) To help wealth redistribution, redo the revenue share calculations to reduce the gap between champs and chumps. Teams that progress make enough through gate-takings.

Of course "nobody cares about 2nd tier tournaments", but the issue under discussion is how much not competing in the CL regularly affects a lesser club's chance to qualify?

At the moment, the "CL money" is helping to create a stable equilibrium at the top of European leagues that is bad for the game. The only clubs to break into the the oligopoly in the Premier League have spent to the hilt to do so. In La Liga there's the prize for third place.

If a top six PL place is accessible to any club with a solid foundation and a good season under its belt, and the second tier comp is as lucrative (in terms of prize money, if not gates) as the first tier, it might give some of those clubs a rung to the top table.

Anyway, if you don't like that: start the 64 clubs in one pot, draw three rounds of entirely random fixtures and send the 32 sides that earn the most points / GD out of the three rounds through to the usual (seeded) group stage. :o

I suspect Platini's thinking is that they are playing 40 European games on most weeks as it is. 24 of those games are squeezed into one day (Thursday), and are viewed by very few people. He stands to make more money by rebranding the lesser games and playing 32 champs league games over 3 days. That's the basic logic.

The change will not be very noticeable logistically, and will have 2 advantages for fans. First, I can watch the big teams 3 nights a week. Second, the Champs league will probably resume earlier in the new year than it does presently. Current Europa league teams will not see increased fixture congestion. Only the present Champs league teams will, And they will happily take an extra £2m gate-takings.

The one drawback would be, at first, the decreased likelihood of seeing a group match like Barca-Milan as the teams would likely be in separate groups. However, over time, The improved wealth distribution would remove that problem

Ah well, undoubtedly it'll be even more of a clusterfuck than the existing system, but I for one think they should at least look to scrap the Europa and come up with an overall setup that makes sense and has a bit of elegance about it.

They also really need to stop calling it the Champions League since that hasn´t been the case ever.

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