Tiago Santos and Lille may already have their biggest win of the season.
Credit...Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Adapting to the Champions League’s New Reality

This year more than ever is showing that the competition means different things to different clubs. And that’s a good thing.

by · NY Times

Lille’s players lingered on the field at the Stade Pierre-Mauroy, communing with their fans. The stands were still full, long after the game had finished, and the party was showing no signs of ending. Ethan Mbappé — famous name, if not quite a familiar face — wore the broad grin of a man who was going to take considerable pleasure in messaging his brother later.

His team had enjoyed a mixed start to the season. Lille sat fifth in Ligue 1, France’s top division: three wins, two losses and a draw. Quite what the next few months would bring was not yet clear. There would not, in all likelihood, be a title challenge in the league. Competition for a Champions League slot was looking intense.

And now, all of a sudden, everything had gathered into cold, sharp focus. Whatever else happened during this campaign, whether those early victories heralded the start of something or whether those defeats were harbingers of trouble, this would always be remembered as the year that Lille beat Real Madrid.

Over the course of its first two rounds, it has been difficult to know what to make of the new format for the Champions League. There is some firm ground: The competition’s new guise is, we can agree, a monument both to the self-interest of Europe’s most powerful teams and the cravenness of the bodies charged with acting as custodians of soccer’s health.

It has been expressly designed, after all, to bow to the incessant demands of the continent’s aristocrats. They wanted more games against each other. Thanks to UEFA’s spinelessness, they got them.

They wanted those encounters to carry with them less jeopardy than, say, a semifinal. They got that, too. They wanted to reduce the risk that any of their number might not qualify for the lucrative, prestigious knockout rounds. Tick.

(The psychology of this is fascinating: These teams, and the various titans of industry and C-suite alphas who own and operate them, are defined by the idea that they should win. The natural state of affairs, they all seem to believe, is that their team should end the season standing proud among their contemporaries, victorious. And yet, so many of their decisions involve thumbing the scales in their favor that it would appear they are all haunted by the specter of failure.)

It can — or at least should — be assumed, too, that such a cosmetic change does not and cannot address the real flaw in the Champions League: the ever-widening inequality in European soccer, the one that means that Lille named a team to face Real Madrid that cost roughly as much in aggregate as Kylian Mbappé alone might earn in a season or two. If anything, the change will serve only to exacerbate it.

Beyond that, though, definitive judgment is elusive. In the plus column: There is a broad consensus that the old model, the multigroup system that had been in place, albeit with the occasional tweak, for the past three decades, had grown stale and predictable. An expanded field and a reimagined structure has served to introduce a degree of freshness, a much-needed dose of uncertainty.

That has brought with it intrigue, something that had been lacking in recent editions.

Various models have been produced to indicate how many points a team might need to qualify for the knockout rounds: It seems 15 or 16 would earn a place in the top eight, a favorable seeding and a pass straight to the last 16; as few as nine might be enough for a spot in the playoffs. But it is all, at best, educated guesswork.

How damaging Real Madrid’s defeat at Lille might prove to be is, for the moment, unknowable. That is not a bad thing.

Perhaps most significant is that those clubs so often treated as somewhere between an afterthought and a nuisance by the elite — the secondary sides from big nations and the champions of smaller-market countries — have a renewed sense of purpose.

That is an unforeseen but ancillary benefit. Have no doubt: The tournament was not crafted with them in mind. But that the cause and the consequence are unrelated does not make the latter any less real.

With only a point from their first two games, PSV Eindhoven and Dinamo Zagreb might, in the old model, already be in effect eliminated from the Champions League, their ambitions recalibrated toward taking a consolation spot in the Europa League. Now, they have six more chances to accrue the two or three victories that might extend their stay in the competition until the spring.

And then, of course, there are the minuses. Statisticians at the BBC have calculated that, in the last decade or so of the Champions League, there were around a dozen so-called thrashings — comprehensive victories by four goals or more — in the group stage. There have already been nine this season, with another six rounds to play. It is going to be a long few months for Slovan Bratislava.

The most common, and the most impactful, complaints, though, have to do with meaning. The first is relatively simple to explain: The new format might allow for more meetings between the continent’s great and good, but those fixtures feel too much like exhibition games.

Paris St.-Germain lost at Arsenal on Tuesday, but Luis Enrique’s team may need to win only two more games to squeeze into the playoff round, and there is very little doubt it will do so. Losing at the Emirates Stadium was a blow to the club’s prestige, but it will most likely have scant ramifications beyond that.

The second is a little more intricate. This format — in which every team is working its way through a bespoke fixture list — feels, to Europeans, inchoate. Every result exists in a bubble. Every team seems to be on its own journey, disconnected from the competition as a whole.

Arsenal does not now have to visit Paris to cement its advantage. P.S.G. must not now face the prospect of finishing second in a group. Both will now go their separate ways. The meeting between them does not have an immediate consequence, not really. It was just a thing that happened, a piece of stand-alone content for a Tuesday night.

To anyone raised on American sports, that will not seem like a problem. The N.F.L., for example, follows a similar pattern: Different teams have different schedules before they reach the playoffs. To Europeans, though, the idea is either novel or alien, or probably both; there is a lack, to the more traditionally minded, of the competitive integrity that has always been soccer’s bedrock.

All of those concerns — complaints, maybe — are legitimate, even if to some extent they are wreathed in a reflexive rejection of anything new, anything different, a belief that the best form of a beloved pastime is the one that is most familiar and most comforting. It is also legitimate to resist a change that has been made only to better serve the narrow interests of the elite.

But the problem with trying to assess what is good for the Champions League, and what is good for European soccer as a whole, is that what makes the Champions League special is different for different clubs and for different fans.

There is more than one type of meaning. There is the grand, the conceptual and the theoretical, the sort that is missing when Arsenal beats P.S.G. without context or consequence. And there is the sort of meaning that is inherent to a soccer game not as a piece of a larger story but as an occasion of its own.

Lille had never previously played Real Madrid. On Tuesday night, it faced the reigning European champion, probably the most famous club in the world, for the first time. Nobody in the Stade Pierre-Mauroy was thinking about an asterisk. Nobody was asking themselves, deep down, what it all meant.

Big Ideas, Small Steps

There was something curiously defensive about the statement released by FIFA to announce the 12 stadiums across the United States selected to host the revamped and expanded Club World Cup next summer. It read a little like an organization getting its rebuttal in first, or perhaps protesting too much.

The tournament, we are told, will pit the “32 best clubs in the world” against each other, a piece of marketing spiel that neglects to mention the presence of, for example, RB Salzburg, a team last seen being taken apart by Brest in the Champions League. Those 32 teams will duke it out for the “only official title of FIFA Club World Champions.” Well, yes. Was anyone claiming otherwise?

Regardless, the fact the competition has a home will be a considerable relief to Gianni Infantino, president of FIFA, self-awareness void and midwife to this particular idea. It means he can now devote all of his time to the rather more pressing problem of the fact that the event does not yet have a television broadcaster.

The reason for that is simple. Nobody knows — nobody can know — quite what Infantino’s tournament will mean to the teams involved. That is especially true of the European entrants, whose enthusiasm will do much to define not only the competition’s viewing figures but also its prestige.

Networks would, obviously, pay more for a month of meaningful soccer featuring Real Madrid, Manchester City, Boca Juniors and Flamengo than for a series of low-wattage exhibition games. At this stage, though, they can have little idea of what they are going to get. And that leaves Infantino in a bind. There are some things that even he cannot simply talk into existence.

Inside the World of Sports

Dive deeper into the people, issues and trends shaping professional, collegiate and amateur athletics.