Group Stage Takes Priority In UEFA’s New Champions League 2024-2025 Format

UEFA’s Champions League revamp for next season has created a bigger group stage, where, according to UEFA, “every game counts.”
The new format will get rid of the current group stage, where 32 teams compete in eight groups of four, and replace this with one giant league of 36 teams. Rather than six group stage games, teams will play eight matches against teams of varying abilities. The draw for this group stage is reportedly so complicated that it needs to be done by computers because if it were done manually, it could take up to four hours.
UEFA’s new format creates 64 extra matches and all the revenue that brings. As those matches come in the group stage and a new knockout playoff round, they could end up benefiting the “smaller” teams in the Champions League, who get to play more matches than under the current format.
The actual benefits to the smaller teams will depend on how revenue is distributed. In this season’s group stage alone, some clubs earned around four times as much as others. UEFA have said that under the new Champions League format, smaller clubs will get a larger share of the prize money than before though.
The new format aims to eliminate “meaningless” group games by making every group stage game count. But by doing that, UEFA might have inadvertently made the Champions League knockout stage less exciting.
The knockout stage has been designed in a way where the higher you come in the group stage, the easier the fixture you potentially get. This gives teams an incentive to finish as high as possible, with UEFA hoping that it means the likes of Manchester City and Real Madrid play their strongest team in their seventh and eighth group matches even if they have already qualified for the knockout rounds.
But this also means that if Manchester City finished top of the league and Real Madrid finished second, they couldn’t face each other until the final. Neither team would face the teams that finished third or fourth until the semi-final either, meaning that the round-of-16 and quarterfinals are more likely to see rather one-sided ties.
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But UEFA might consider a less enthralling round of 16 or quarterfinal a worthwhile trade-off for a larger and supposedly more meaningful group stage.
According to marketing firm MiQ, the average viewing times for 2016 to 2019 are roughly the same for the group stage, round of sixteen and quarterfinals. For the group stage, viewers watched for an average of 20 minutes, climbing to 26 minutes by the quarterfinals. This then jumped to 52 minutes for the semifinals and 71 minutes for the final.
That suggests that even if viewership and possible revenue falls slightly for the quarterfinals and round of 16, the increased viewership from “more meaningful” matches in the latter games of the group stage should offset the drop caused by one-sided games in the early knockout rounds.
That is of course assuming that viewers find the new group stage exciting.
While the format should create some group stage clashes between Europe’s top teams, there is no chance of a “group of death” like in 2022/23 when Barcelona were knocked out after two tight group stage games against Inter Milan.
With eight matches to play, and the safety net of the playoffs should a team fail to make the top eight, a surprise result such as Copenhagen’s 4-3 win against Manchester United in this year’s Champions League might have meaning, but it won’t be decisive on its own.
For many of the top teams, despite UEFA saying that every game counts, the group stage seems to provide no real jeopardy.