There are a lot of elite footballers who still have the Champions League theme as their ringtone, and some will be actively playing it on the way to stadiums. Familiarity hasn’t dulled excitement. It’s fair to say that isn’t really from the relative laboriousness of the group stage, but rather the exquisite energy of the knockouts.
This week is where football history starts to be made, partly because of how visions of glory can be instantly consigned to the past. It is tension and tantalising opportunity all at once. Through that, there’s a distinctive thought, one even more striking than the sense many players will feel this week of stepping out into great stadiums. A good chunk of this season’s stars were children when watching Barcelona’s comeback against Paris Saint-Germain in 2017, the kind of game that made them first realise the unique magic of these nights.
That was obviously the case for Camp Nou’s current talents like Lamine Yamal, Pedri and Gavi but also stars like Jude Bellingham, Jamal Musiala, Ryan Gravenberch and arguably even William Saliba and Bukayo Saka. Such grandeur and mystique is what Uefa and all of football’s major stakeholders at least think they are striving for.
It’s why during this week it’s hard not to wonder what the competition would be like if it started with a straight knockout. There’d certainly be no debate about formats, or victories that seem formalities.
It would immediately be intense, with interest and engagement in the games so much higher. Knockout football was what really made European football, too. This is what it was founded on. There are a number of ironies to that, given the initial plan for the European Cup in 1955 was for a full league, only for the reality of logistics to demand reconsideration. Clubs couldn’t commit that much time. They arrived on a compelling compromise, which was the “European Cup” in the truest sense of the name: knockout football. That energy fired the spirit of the competition, especially a sense of adventure and glory. There will naturally be much more of both if everything can end in two games, or one night.
It does beg the question of why there isn’t more now.
That will simply never happen because of the interests of those same stakeholders. They want a certain amount of games between the wealthiest clubs guaranteed, essentially self-perpetuating their presence in the competition.
A comment frequently heard now is that such stakeholders don’t actually understand what makes football attractive. It isn’t just games between the “big clubs”, per se, but games between the big clubs that actually matter – or, just games that matter.
Nothing in club football, as emphasised by the ringtones, matters as much to players as the Champions League knockouts. The appeal is why Fifa are creating the Club World Cup, in the hope of superficially recreating it.
Those same stakeholder interests still influenced the “purity” of this season’s knockouts. It wasn’t set by an open draw, after all.
The need to give the expanded group stage some greater significance brought Wimbledon-style brackets, where teams are now placed onto preset routes. A further irony is that this has, in turn, ended up creating a knockout stage that is as lopsided as last year’s.
Liverpool’s reward for finishing on top of the group stage was to meet PSG, who are arguably the freshest and most resurgent side in Europe. The early problems of PSG’s group stage seem quite distant, and they don’t have anyone else’s problems of intense fixture congestion. They are instead going to find the path to Munich’s final blocked by most of the wealthiest clubs.
Or, given Liverpool could well meet Arsenal in the semi-finals, might we have one of those situations where the team that faces disappointment in the league are invigorated by Europe? Mikel Arteta certainly sees this as an opportunity. Unai Emery may well have something to say about that. His own supreme record in European knockout football might well represent one of the wildcard factors in this season’s knockouts, and why Aston Villa should be taken very seriously.
The 1982 European Cup winners would represent surprise champions now, and maybe the most unexpected winner since Porto in 2004. While the economics of the modern game have ensured the Champions League is now the preserve of the super clubs, this season at least has a few elements that offer the hope of something different.
The league format has exhausted some big squads, as can be seen in so many injuries. The Professional Footballers’ Association has consistently warned how the latter stages of such competitions are becoming like the 12th round of boxing matches, where teams are throwing in whatever they have left.
Manchester City, meanwhile, didn’t even make it this far. Pep Guardiola’s side were just a subplot to Kylian Mbappe’s quest to finally win this competition, which is one of many invigorating storylines in this round. It’s maybe just a pity it isn’t like this from the start.
