The one thing to remember with this new Champions League, if you actually managed to register the vast list of fixtures quickly presented on the screen, is that we won't truly know how it works until it's actually played.
It might work well. Uefa feel the modelling has been successful, and yesterday’s draw has thrown up some exciting games, with storylines. Some of the last five finals are being replayed, including Real Madrid-Liverpool. The Reds also face Xabi Alonso’s Bayer Leverkusen, as Arsenal host Mikel Arteta’s former club in Paris Saint-Germain and Aston Villa get to replay their victorious 1982 final against Bayern Munich.
There are certainly more games between wealthy clubs, which is of course the reason why we’re all here. This format was agreed the morning after the ill-fated Super League was launched in April 2021, and it was the very threat of that plan that essentially forced Uefa into this in the first place.
It weighed over everything, to the point the two words were almost said. Zlatan Ibrahimovic was about to describe the competition as Aleksander Ceferin’s Super League in a bizarre promo video, only for the Uefa president to theatrically cut him off. Even before that, there were the coded digs at one of the chief architects of the Super League, in former Juventus head Andrea Agnelli. Awards were given to Gigi Buffon, one of the Italian club’s greatest legends, and Cristiano Ronaldo, the player Agnelli specifically signed to try to move Juve into a higher sphere. Buffon described this as the most important club competition, while Ronaldo had a starring line pressing the gameshow-style button that revealed the software’s pick of fixtures.
There was still a moment when it looked like the fixtures came up a millisecond before the button was pushed, maybe giving away it was just there for show.
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