Luckily, Nicky Hayen has a natural talent for miming. The circumstances in which Hayen, the Club Brugge coach, found himself trying to communicate with his team were not ideal. The stands at the Jan Breydel stadium were still full. The noise was so loud it seemed like the whole place, a concrete giant held together by convention and hope, might collapse.
Just minutes after the final whistle of his team’s victory against Sporting, he gathered his players in a tight circle for a post-match briefing. They glistened with sweat and victory, their arms around each other’s shoulders. Even at close range, most instinctively leaned forward, straining to hear their trainer amid the commotion.
His gestures, however, were emphatic enough to make his message abundantly clear. At various points, he pointed to the players themselves, to the jubilant fans, to the gleaming pitch: This is who you are, this is what you did, this is where you belong. He clenched his fists and raised his arms in triumph, the signal to his players that they could start jumping, dancing and spraying bottles of water instead of champagne.
Hayen, in other words, didn’t seem to believe that this game, this victory, lacked meaning.
The same was true for Brugge’s players and their jubilant fans. The team remained on the field for another ten minutes after the joyful conclusion of Hayen’s impromptu meeting. There was a complete lap of honor. They stopped in front of the Brugge ultras to communicate with their fans. Casper Nielsen, who scored the winning goal, had the privilege of serving as choirmaster and conductor.
Since its inception and debut, the Champions League’s new format — with its endless stream of games, its blurred lines and its extendable table — has transformed what was once football’s most revered club competition into a pale, false version. of herself.
The tournament, the theory goes, is now bloated almost beyond repair, its drama diluted and its risk manufactured. Each game is inherently disposable, taking place in a vacuum of meaning, detached from the competition as a whole, a kind of landfill football, staged for the sake of staged, each a milestone in football’s journey from sport to cynical content delivery channel lucrative.
All of this could be true, of course. While the Jan Breydel Stadium crowd sang the praises of Hayen and his players, it seemed no one bothered to tell Club Brugge.
That the new Champions League format has its roots in endless greed — and the selfish cowardice of the cartel of Premier League powerhouses and continental aristocrats who have long confused their own interests with those of the game as a whole — is not really in question .
The “Swiss model”, as it was labelled, was initially endorsed by UEFA (Union of European Football Associations) as a way of appeasing the big teams, to ensure they felt the Champions League was working for them. It’s just a little ironic, then, that much of the work on its design took place at almost exactly the same time that a dozen of those clubs were also busy working on their short-lived and ill-fated European Super League.
The two projects weren’t that different. Europe’s elite wanted to make more money. That meant playing more games and, crucially, more games with each other.
After the Superliga’s collapse, an executive at a rebel club — who asked to remain anonymous to protect his relationships — acknowledged being confused by what he perceived as a disconnect between what fans said they wanted and what the data seemed to suggest they actually wanted. .
High-profile meetings between the big teams that normally make up the final stages of the Champions League are incredibly popular. What was bad about wanting to play them more often?
This format should meet this demand. But at the same time, as it grew numerically, it was projected to shrink geographically. Initially, some clubs proposed introducing legacy places, reserved for previous winners regardless of whether they qualified or not.
UEFA and the European Leagues, the umbrella body representing all of Europe’s domestic leagues, successfully opposed it. It was, said one executive involved in the discussions, little more than a way to protect the top Italian teams, in particular, from their own shortcomings.
The compromise came in the form of two “coefficient slots”, reserved for teams from the leagues that performed best in Europe’s three competitions the previous season: a more palatable option, but nevertheless an obvious concession to the same vested interests.
The Champions League group stage now contains 36 teams. The top five leagues provide 22 of them. The result has been a competition that has at times felt clumsy, inelegant and exhausting.
There was no universal experience of this iteration of the Champions League. It is not possible to say that some, all or none of the games have a prescribed level of meaning. How much a game matters to a club is completely personalized.
All of this was unforeseen. The gaming megaliths did not redesign the Champions League to empower the little ones. But an unintended consequence is a consequence nonetheless.
It doesn’t seem, in those parts of the competition where the light shines a little less brightly, that any of this matters as much. In Brugge, the competition certainly doesn’t seem to be losing relevance, as if it now exists only as a shadow of what it once was: nothing more than a stream of empty content.
“I’m really proud of the team,” Hayen said after regaining his composure, his team now one draw, one win, one game away from the heights of the knockout stages of the Champions League. “Let’s keep our feet on the ground, but we also have to really enjoy it. Sometimes you don’t enjoy those moments enough.”
