will you watch football in 5 years time ?

Scroll to see replies

You could still qualify having not won your league but you had to go via the qualifying rounds and not straight into the group stage.

It makes no sense having a Champions League where the teams who automatically qualify are not champions.

It's also allowed clubs to get bigger and bigger without actually winning anything.

Champion vs champion in knock out format, the top 3/4 in the other leagues play in the Europa (knock out format).

Lovely jubbly.

Think this is crucial. Previously when a dominant team fell away, like Liverpool in the early 1990s there was no real financial restraint to any top-10 team making a go at the title. Get a good manager in with a solid strategy and you were in a title race. (Newcastle, Leeds, Blackburn etc all had a go). Now even if you think you're a million miles off the champions, you also know that if they weren't around there'd always be 4 or 5 other giants waiting to race ahead anyway so there's not even the glimmer of success for many big clubs. It does somewhat kill the excitement of what should be a contest between 20 clubs....

It is really quite arbitrary anyway. Speaking as an Arsenal fan, we've been rewarded to the tune of about £300m over the past 10 years over the likes of Spurs for essentially finishing one place ahead in the table and then achieving very little in the actual CL. So if 4th is such a big deal, why not reward 2nd over 3rd? or 1st over 2nd to such a degree as 4th over 5th. Arbitrary.

If you want to make the CL a better quality competition then fine, have 4 PL sides, but distribute the CL revenues evenly for all sides between 2nd and 17th. Participating in the CL should be a reward in itself for the top4.