More games, one giant table, no more dead group-stage nights where a team with nothing to play for parks the bus against a rival with everything on the line — that was the pitch when UEFA scrapped the old 32-team groups for a single 36-team league phase in 2024. Every club plays eight different opponents, the top eight go straight through, the next sixteen fight it out in a playoff round, and the bottom twelve go home. Cleaner, fairer, more meritocratic. Except the format's own opening season produced a result that quietly argues the opposite.
The table that meant almost nothing
Liverpool topped that first 36-team league phase in 2024-25. Not a wildcard qualifier, not a team that snuck through — the actual best record across eight matches, under a first-season manager in Arne Slot who was also steering them to a Premier League title that same year. Mohamed Salah and Virgil van Dijk led a squad that did exactly what the new format asked: show up, win consistently, earn the top seed. UEFA's own selling point was that this table would mean something — no more accusations of a soft group buying a team an easy passage to the last sixteen.
Then the round of 16 happened, and Liverpool went out. To Paris Saint-Germain. On penalties.
The team that needed a lifeline won it all
PSG's route through that same league phase was the opposite kind of story. Achraf Hakimi and his teammates stumbled through their eight games well enough to avoid direct elimination but not well enough to avoid the newly invented playoff round — the exact in-between zone the format's designers built as a safety net for exactly this kind of team. PSG used it. Then they eliminated the table's actual top seed in the round of 16, beat Aston Villa, dispatched Declan Rice's Arsenal in the semi-final, and finished the job with a 5-0 demolition of Lautaro Martínez's Inter Milan in the Munich final — a scoreline so lopsided it barely looked like the same competition PSG had scraped through months earlier.
Two teams, one trophy, and the format's foundational promise sitting somewhere between them, unresolved.
What the numbers were actually supposed to fix
The old complaint about 32-team groups was real: four teams, six games, and by matchday five half the fixtures were dead rubbers — a group winner already decided, a mid-table Bundesliga side playing out a 0-0 against a Portuguese club with nothing left to prove either way. UEFA's fix increased the raw sample size (eight opponents instead of three) on the theory that a bigger table produces a more honest ranking. It does, mathematically. What nobody quite priced in is that "more honest league-phase ranking" and "who wins the trophy" were never actually promised to be the same question, and the very first cycle of the new system proved it in the starkest way possible: the top seed lost in the round of 16, and the team that survived by the skin of its teeth lifted the cup.
Nobody pretended this was only about fairness
It's worth saying plainly that "meritocracy" wasn't the only reason the league phase exists. Eight guaranteed matches per club instead of six means eight guaranteed broadcast windows, eight more matchdays of sponsorship inventory, eight more nights of continental football for UEFA to sell. Managers noticed the trade-off before a single ball was kicked under the new system — Pep Guardiola and Jürgen Klopp both flagged fixture congestion as a real cost of the expansion, long before the league phase produced its first table. None of that makes the format illegitimate. It just means the pitch about fairness arrived bundled with a much less romantic one about revenue, and only one of the two got repeated in the press releases.
The part football already knew, dressed in a new format
None of this is really a scandal — it's closer to what basketball and American football fans have argued for decades: a regular season measures consistency, a knockout measures who peaks at the right moment, and conflating the two is a category error dressed up as fairness. English top-flight football has resisted playoffs specifically to avoid this exact tension; UEFA, by expanding the league phase while keeping a knockout bolted onto the end of it, built a hybrid that inherited the honesty of one system and the chaos of the other. That's not necessarily worse football. It might even be more dramatic football — a league phase worth watching in its own right, followed by a knockout that owes it nothing. But "more meritocratic" was the specific claim being sold, and PSG's run says the trophy still belongs to whoever gets hot in March, same as it always did.
So does the format work?
It works as a spectacle — more competitive fixtures, fewer meaningless ones, a bigger stage for clubs who'd previously have been eliminated by October. It has simply not delivered what it promised as a meritocracy, because knockout football was never going to stop rewarding form over the long-run body of work, no matter how large you make the table that precedes it. Worth remembering the next time a pundit calls a club's league-phase finish "proof" of anything. The 2024-25 season already ran that experiment, and the answer came back a 5-0 final.
Next time you're sizing up a Daily Play riddle from a Champions League run, remember: the club badge tells you where they finished. It doesn't tell you when they peaked.