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For the first time in this season’s new Champions League, players and managers are using one of those definitive football terms about a fixture. Pep Guardiola described Manchester City’s match with Club Brugge as “our final”. Unai Emery has been saying similar about Aston Villa’s home game against Celtic, with Luis Enrique echoing as much ahead of Paris Saint-Germain’s showdown in Stuttgart.
There is finally an acute clarity about what teams need to do, which hasn’t always been the case in this new group stage. Many players even found the middle of the campaign quite strange, because the open format meant the stakes of any individual match weren’t obvious. No more.
This final day is what it is all about, and what it’s all been building up to.
Rather than a “final”, though, this last day is going to be unlike anything the game has ever witnessed. Wednesday night will be a true live TV event and appointment viewing for fans around the world.
It is also a very modern development in how the place to be won’t be the big match where the best action has happened, unless you’re a club supporter. The place to be will be in front of screens, because something just as important is going to happen elsewhere.
Football has never really had that to this degree before. Even on the final day of a Premier League season or a World Cup group stage, the real emotion is in the stadium. Here, there’s just going to be too much going on everywhere. You could miss the event by being there. People won’t know where to look, and that will be a good thing. The chaos that previously made this Champions League seem vague will now vigorously serve it. There are bigger implications for football’s future there, and it makes this a potential historical watershed.
At the start of this four-decade long process to a “Super League”, Silvio Berlusconi’s idea was for football matches to be “television spectaculars”. This now goes past that, too. It is the television event, rather than being at the game, that is the “spectacular”.
For the night itself, broadcasters have had a lot of discussions about how they’re going to maximise this. The number of games is great for them but also a challenge. A huge amount of live information is going to have to be displayed on screen in a comprehensible way. TNT Sports had dry runs with the Conference League and plans to have Ally McCoist in the studio for their goals show. There are even the basic logistics of how do you present that huge 36-team table on screen as it changes in real time?
Despite all the fair jokes about that from earlier in the campaign, Uefa and the European Club Association are smiling now. The majority of concerns from the middle of the stage – when one senior figure complained they needed to revert to the old system – have gone, with the main stakeholders content. The clubs have responded well, and most feel the format has met the main objective of more European football to teams of all levels and also more drama.
The numbers speak for themselves there. Sixteen of the last 18 matches have at least something on the line, and five of those involve outright elimination, not just trying to get into the top 24. Four of those 18 are also direct play-offs, with as many as 12 teams still hopeful of reaching the top eight. The initial focus will be on Manchester City (25th) v Club Brugge (20th), Brest (13th) v Real Madrid (16th), Lille (12th) v Feyenoord (11th), Aston Villa (9th) v Celtic (18th) and Stuttgart (24th) v PSG (22nd) but there is also a chance for games with more layered motivations, such as Juventus v Benfica, to come alive.
For Uefa’s part, too, there’s been more to this than Wednesday. There’s also been the set-up. Each of the last few matchdays have had at least one game that has escalated into mayhem, like Benfica 4-5 Barcelona or PSG 4-2 City.
It is genuinely good for European football that Atalanta, Aston Villa, Feyenoord, Lille and Brest are up there. Celtic and PSV Eindhoven admirably making the play-offs is supposed to be the point of all this, meanwhile, along with Club Brugge’s chance to eliminate Man City.
The English champions are one of six recent finalists – including Borussia Dortmund, Bayern Munich, Juventus, PSG and Real Madrid – to endure trouble.
That represents the variety and vitality that modern football has so badly needed. It has undeniably freshened up an opening stage that had gone stale, even if the change still sidesteps the main problem of financial disparity in elite football.
That is where there are some caveats to all of this excitement, as well as the mea culpa revisionism from those of us who criticised the new competition.
The format has become a qualified success through some of its inherent issues.
One of the reasons there is so much tension going into this final day is because so many clubs are utterly desperate to avoid the extra two games of the play-offs. That aim is only so important, however, because of the extra two games in this very Champions League opening stage. The new calendar has started to involve a real cost for the major clubs. Many have struggled to cope, and it has seen a proliferation of fitness issues.
For some clubs, reaching the top eight might be the difference between a title challenge and not, or another Champions League qualification and not. Two free midweeks are suddenly immensely valuable.
These aren’t really what the stakes should be. What’s more, these aren’t usually what the form trends look like.
Another key reason this format has so far worked is that some of the wealthiest clubs have struggled to an unexpected degree. And why has that happened? Two extra games causing those fitness issues.
The format has almost become self-fulfilling in that sense. More games, more fatigue, more error, more drama. But higher quality and long-term solutions? That is more debatable.
It goes without saying that exhausting footballers isn’t really a sustainable solution to the problem of financial disparity. What are the likely responses going to be? Guardiola has already spoken about needing a bigger squad, and the bottom line is that this format change only happened because the wealthiest clubs wanted more money, which will serve to pay for those bigger squads.
By the same token, it isn’t a guarantee clubs like Brest or Villa can do this again.
Hence the senior vice-president of sport at TNT Sports’ owner, Warner Bros Discovery, Scott Young, said last week that “it’s a bit too early for us to judge the success”.
There is then the effect of those feeling the fatigue, in the players, because it isn’t just physical. Barcelona’s Frenkie de Jong spoke recently about how there is a mental fatigue, in how he’s noticed ‘the anticipation is disappearing”.
“When I was young, you looked forward to a European match or international match for days. Now you only have to turn on the TV and there is a match somewhere.”
In other words, so much of the calendar just feels like more content. That was the case with a lot of this opening stage, but it does have another self-fulfilling element.
More games ensure some of them are mathematically bound to be exciting, meaning the many drab matches – especially in the earlier months – tend to be forgotten. Two enthralling TV matches a week are enough, especially when they all build up to what Wednesday will be. As De Jong said, you just have to turn on the TV.
This will be a night to savour. As to whether it’s a transformation to celebrate, that will take more than one season to decide.
