More national derby games possible when revamped Champions League starts next year
Manchester City’s head coach Pep Guardiola kisses the trophy after winning the Champions League final soccer match between Manchester City and Inter Milan at the Ataturk Olympic Stadium in Istanbul, Turkey, Sunday, June 11, 2023. Manchester City won 1-0. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)
GENEVA (AP) — Teams from the same country will have more chances to play each other when the Champions League and other European club competitions are revamped next year, UEFA said Monday.
There will be an open draw for the round of 16 without so-called “country protection” and two teams from a high-ranked nation could also face each other in the new league stage “to avoid a deadlock in the draw,” UEFA acknowledged.
Currently, teams from the same country are always separated in the traditional group stage and cannot meet in the knockout phase until the quarterfinals.
That changes in the 2024-25 season when the Champions League, Europa League and re-branded Conference League each move to a 36-team format with a single standings table.
Teams in the Champions League and Europa League will play eight games each in the league phase, which will end in January. Conference League teams will have six rounds ending in December.
The extra games, drawn from four seeding pots each containing nine teams, means country protection cannot be ensured for the most successful nations.
“Exceptionally, a maximum of one match per club against another club from the same association may be allowed for associations with four or more clubs in the league phase,” UEFA said in a letter to European soccer officials published Monday.
Other changes to the traditional look of UEFA club competitions were confirmed in the letter.
Teams who make the knockout rounds will be drawn into a seeded bracket — like a tennis tournament, separating the Nos. 1 and 2 seeds until the final — instead of the current system of making a fresh draw for each round.
UEFA said this was “to strengthen the synergy between league and knockout phases and to provide more sporting incentives to the league phase.”
Teams finishing top of the 36-team standings will be the No. 1 seed and those placed second to eighth will be seeded accordingly in the round of 16.
Teams placed ninth to 16th will be seeded in the new knockout playoff round in February, drawn against unseeded teams placing 17th to 24th.
The new formats will create more midweek games for UEFA and the Champions League is set to start with an exclusive week playing from Tuesday to Thursday, Sept. 17-19, 2024.
One week later, the Europa League is scheduled to have its exclusive season launch on Sept. 25-26. The Conference League will start on Oct. 3 and have an exclusive match night on Dec. 19.
The league stages in the top two tiers will continue into January with the Champions League having its seventh round on Jan. 21-22 and all teams in action for the decisive eighth round on Jan. 29.
Another tweak to the Champions League in 2024-25 relates to which team gets lifted out of the qualifying rounds up to direct entry when the competition is won by a team that already earned its place next season through its domestic league position.
Manchester City had already secured the Premier League title when it won the Champions League final last month, meaning the group-stage place reserved for the title holder went the country with the highest ranking based on UEFA competition results which did not have a direct entry. That was Ukraine and Shakhtar Donetsk got the place.
Next year, in a similar scenario, UEFA has decided that direct entry will go to the highest-ranked domestic champion in the qualifying rounds, rather than to a country. That could still reward Shakhtar, or a team like Dinamo Zagreb or Slavia Prague.
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