By the way...

There’s more tinsel today

This is the most coveted trophy in club soccer.

(Bild: GEPA)

"Krone" columnist Harald Petermichl took a closer look at soccer's premier league. And came to the conclusion that UEFA has done everything right with the development of the Champions League. Or maybe not.

The time has finally come on May 31, 2025. Then the final of the Champions League 24/25 will take place in the soccer arena in Fröttmaning, not far from the venerable Munich I sewage treatment plant. There will be enough time until then to determine the two finalists from the 36 competing teams and it will take just 188 matches, 144 of which will be played for the sole purpose of eliminating twelve teams. Assuming that there will be no extra time and excluding any injury time, there will have been 282 hours, or almost twelve full days of Champions League soccer before the final. This was by no means always the case, because when the competition was still called the European Cup of Champions, significantly fewer matches were played and there was always a winner in the end.

Sixty years before Fröttmaning, for example, when Inter Milan won the final against Benfica Lisbon, only 61 matches had been played. And this was despite the fact that 32 teams were already taking part in the competition at the time, and in the event of a tie after two matches, there was an additional deciding match and even a draw if necessary. For the first sixteen to be eliminated, 33 matches were needed, i.e. over 100 fewer than are needed today to eliminate the twelve. Nevertheless, it seems that the door was not left wide open to chance, as teams such as Sliema Wanderers, Gornik Zabrze (still known as Gornik Hindenburg in German sports journalism at the time), Lahden Raipas and Chemie Leipzig were not to be found in the round of 16.

However, this crisp version of playing for a cup, which originated in a strangely distant time, had one huge disadvantage: it required far less imagination as to how to deal with equal points than is the case in the current 36-team league. As a result, soccer fans in the 1960s never had the benefit of smart rules such as the "higher number of points scored by the eight opponents of the club in question" or the "better combined goal difference of the eight opponents" being the deciding factor if goal difference, number of away goals or other bells and whistles had not yet determined the league position. This alone is an invaluable added value of the new league model and UEFA seems to have done everything right once again. As always and exclusively for the good of soccer, of course.