The final whistle at Wembley Stadium on Saturday, at the end of the Champions League final between Real Madrid and Dortmund, will not only lead to the official crowning of the next European champion and bring down the curtain on the 23/24 playing season, but will also lock in an era in European football in the biggest enterprise it has to offer. The new reform of UEFA for a new, bigger and more arduous Champions League will be launched this September, and it is safe to say that the method that will be implemented from next season may largely change the fate of the teams that reach the finals.
We will immediately explain why. But first we will refer to the finalists. The very fact that Real Madrid, who ranked third in the betting relations on the eve of the season’s opening (after Manchester City and Bayern Munich), qualified for the final obviously does not surprise anyone and will of course be super favorites to win their 15th cup on English soil. On the other hand, there is no doubt at all that Dortmund is a refreshing and unexpected breath of fresh air in the view of the champions finals. Not only is Dortmund returning to the Champions League final for the first time since 2013, it is doing so after a season in which it finished only fifth in the league and on the opening night of the Champions League it was ranked 15th (!) in the table of winning ratios.
Dortmund is not the first surprising team to qualify for the final in recent years. We will of course mention Inter, who last year ranked 11th in the table of relations, and yet made it to the final, where they lost to the favorite Manchester City. Three years ago, Chelsea was the team with the lowest chance of winning among the English teams (City, Liverpool and Manchester United) and on the opening night of the round of 16, they were ranked only eighth in the overall chances of winning. That didn’t stop her from qualifying for the final and beating the ultra favorite, City, en route to the title. Two years earlier, it was Tottenham with a ratio of 1 to 25 to win the trophy with the big ears and 10th place on the opening night of the season in the betting table, who stunned many and qualified for their first and last final, where they lost to Liverpool.
In other words, the Champions League teaches us almost consistently that the most flashy and richest teams are not necessarily the ones that fully deserve it and certainly not necessarily those that have been marked by the experts as the main candidates for the title. After all, if that were the case, PSG of Leo Messi, Kylian Mbappe and Neymar would already have won the Champions League, and Guardiola’s City had been champions for three years in a row. In reality the Parisians reached the final only once, 4 years ago and the Citizens have one trophy in the cupboard. Of course, a method such as a knockout that includes two games in each round, holds such and other surprises in contrast to the impending league system which would reflect more the balance of power and certainly make it difficult for teams from the second tier of Europe to start completely.
Next season things will look different. As mentioned, the league will be increased to 36 teams, when each team will play 8 games in one long league (4 at home and 4 away), two games against each tier, and at the end the promotion and crossover will be determined according to their position in one league. The first stage should not interest us in this context, but the new knockout method. According to UEFA, next season the regular draws will be discontinued, and those ranked 1 to 8, in addition to the additional eight who advance from the playoffs, will face each other in the round of 16 and beyond according to their final position, similar to the ranking tree system in the Grand Slam tennis matches. In the bottom row, ranked 1 and 2 in the regular season They will not be able to meet in a knockout, but only in the final of the Champions League.
To add content to things, we prepared a short simulation of what would have happened if the reform had gone into effect in the last two seasons. For the purpose of the game, Dortmund would have finished the new league only in eighth place overall (according to its number of points), and therefore would have probably met with the strong Manchester City in the quarter-finals, if it had passed Napoli in the eighth. Assuming that Pep Guardiola and his players were surprised, Edin Trezic’s team would have met Arsenal in the semi-finals. In reality, it had to pass PSV, Atlético and PSG, and it should of course be mentioned that it fell on the good side of the draw and avoided City, Real, Bayern and Arsenal, who were ranked 1st to 4th in the regular season.
Things were also similar in the case of Inter Model 2023. The Nerazzurri, to remind you 11th place in the betting agencies, qualified for the final last season after beating Porto, Benfica and Milan in the quarter and a half finals of the Champions League. Simona Inzaghi’s team, which as mentioned was given few chances to qualify for the final, especially after the group stage was successful from 14th place (out of the 16 that advance), would have encountered rivals such as Liverpool, PSG and Real Madrid before the Champions League final. Both in the case of Dortmund and in the case of Inter, it is of course impossible to know what would have happened if, but on paper the two would have received more difficult and challenging draws with a high probability according to the new reform of UEFA.
Of course, none of this detracts from Dortmund’s achievement in the current season. She was superior to her rivals in the final knockout stages and deservedly advanced to the finals of the Champions League. If, of course, they stun Real Madrid and win the cup with the big ears, they will probably be crowned as one of the surprising teams in the history of the Champions League, eclipsing even their first win in 1997 after beating Juventus, the European champions at the time, in the famous final in Munich. The last one to win the factory from fifth place was Liverpool in 2005, after the miraculous comeback in the unforgettable final in Istanbul.
Tradition almost always goes with the favorites in the final. Excluding Chelsea’s two wins in 2012 and 2021, the better finalist on paper is also the winner of the Champions Trophy, at least if you look at all the last 15 finals. When Real Madrid is also in the final, which has not lost in this class since 1981, Dortmund’s chances even decrease. In this sense, UEFA’s new system will not be able to prevent surprises in the final game (which will remain in the format of one game in a neutral stadium), but it will certainly make it difficult for Cinderellas such as Dortmund to appear in this class. Those who fancied a classic final among the “favorites” will probably have to wait For the coming years, maybe the news will come from the new reform.
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