European Club Association seeks more Champions League games
The ECA has proposed a new format with four groups of eight teams: "Today everything is about brand exposure," says Andrea Agnelli.
The chairman of the European Club Association, Andrea Agnelli, has put forward a proposal to restructure the Champions League group stage into four groups of eight instead of eight of four, while also suggesting that domestic leagues should recude the number of fixtures played each year.
"We all want more international [European] games and less domestic, combined with an overall reduction of games because we don’t want to go over a certain number,” Agnelli, who is also the president of Juventus, said in an interview with The Guardian.
Agnelli’s proposal is to maintain the current number of total group stage participants at 32, but by halving the mumber of groups extend the number of games each side will play to 14 compared to the six currently staged in each section of the opening phase.
Agnelli: "Today everything is about brand exposure"
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“I believe it is part of the normal evolution of football,” Agnelli continued. “Whether we are Man United, Real Madrid, Juventus, or Legia Warsaw, Sporting Lisbon, and Anderlecht, we all want more international exposure, to develop our brands. Today everything is about brand exposure.”
The ECA chief also suggested that domestic leagues could be tweaked to accommodate an expanded Champions League group phase: “You could say that whoever participates [in the expanded Champions League] has to play in the national league with six U21 or U23 players. But it’s brainstorming because there isn’t a project at the moment.”