UEFA are considering scrapping the semi-finals of the Champions League for a five-day festival. As ever, supporters have not been consulted.
Such has been the way in which UEFA has already conducted itself over their reimagining of the Champions League, it was starting to feel as though the European Super League might not have been such a bad idea at all. Their current plan of a Swiss-style league system, with four more teams in this stage of the competition and scores of extra matches, was bad enough. But they compounded this by pushing on with their plans to hand two of these extra spaces to clubs with the highest coefficients who had not qualified automatically.
Now they’re moving on to the latter stages of the tournament, and their plans for this seem to be just as half-baked. There is reportedly growing support for straight, single-legged knockout matches in the semi-finals, with both games and the final taking place in one host city. The supposed intention is that it would resemble a festival of football in one concentrated area to be held over a five-day period at the end of every season.
That’s right – another ‘festival of football’, to go alongside the World Cup, the European Championships, the Women’s World Cup, the Women’s European Championships, the Nations League, the Club World Cup and a whole host of other tournaments which have to be squeezed into a calendar which isn’t getting any bigger. Then again, let’s not completely discount the possibility of FIFA or UEFA trying to slow the orbit of the Earth around the sun to make space for The Over-65’s World Cup, The Europa League’s Got Talent, or whatever else they can cram in there).
I don”t like two-legged cup matches at all, but this all reads like prepping the Champions League’s final stages for being played outside of Europe, to me. https://t.co/ksXO6ZB3Ml
— Ian King (@twoht) April 28, 2022
It speaks volumes for the extent to which the game’s administrators are not…
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