Fixing the Europa League: Page 2 - The Arsenal discussion community: One More in the Tolly

Fixing the Europa League

Burnwinter

Rex wrote:
Not sure I like the idea of expanding the CL. I feel there are already too many matches with teams I have very little interest in, and it already isn't that much fun to watch the big teams completely overwhelm the smaller teams in the group stages.

Rank mismatches are the reason you need some sort of division system—but the two divisions would need to have a harmonised competition system (probably both their own groups / knockout rounds), and there would need to be a distribution of concrete rewards and penalties in the form of seeding, placement in the upper tier, "relegation" to the lower tier, etc.

Rex

That basically means that you call the division that is now called Europa League Champions League instead, no? I can't for the life of me see how that division would attract more interest than the EL does now.

It is an interesting idea though! If the top 'division' would be the CL as it is today, I wouldn't mind seeing a system where only the 8 group winners and the 4 best group runners up were guaranteed a spot in the last 16, the knock out stage. Have 4 teams from the second 'division' fight it out for the remaining 4 spots.

In our situation going forward, where we are likely to have one of the real powerhouses in our group, it would mean that there would be no more of the meaningless, crap matches; we'd have to assume that we wouldn't end up ahead of Bayern, for example, and really have to focus on getting both good results and scoring goals in the other fixtures.

Burnwinter

Yeah, that's the kind of thing I see as working better—get rid of dead rubbers in Europe as much as possible, in the same way as in the PL, where the top seven places and the last three all mean something concrete.

There's a number of things you could do to spice up the CL independently. For instance, exclude all the last place getters in the groups from the next season's competition. 8)

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