The never-ending season #1: All you need to know about the new Champions League

The revamped version of Europe's biggest club competition will see 36 teams in a single group, with the first 144 matches eliminating just 12 of those clubs

Elite football, especially in Europe, has reached the point where, to all intents and purposes, the season never ends. And the calendar is about to get more crowded still, first via the new, expanded Champions League, featuring more teams and more games than ever before, and then, next summer, via FIFA’s new and expanded Club World Cup (CWC), featuring 32 teams competing in venues still unconfirmed but mostly across America’s east coast, between 15 June and 13 July 2025.

The 2024-25 Champions League will climax with a final at the Allianz Arena in Munich on 31 May next year, and it’s possible one or more of the finalists could then be heading to the USA within days of that final to prepare for the FIFA CWC.

Various clubs who are likely to go deep into this season’s Champions League - whether Manchester City, Bayern Munich, Real Madrid, PSG, Inter, Dortmund or someone else - could have little or no break before playing in the 2025 CWC, and then have just a week or two before pre-season training starts ahead of the 2025-26 domestic season. That in turn will be followed within weeks by the men’s World Cup in the USA between 11 June and 19 July 2026. 

It’s not a new observation that football’s calendar has become crowded, or that FIFA and UEFA are engaged in a battle for supremacy in club football.

We have already reached the point where one season hasn’t formally ended before the next one has begun. Euro 2024, for example, which finished on Sunday 14 July, was still ongoing when the first qualifying round for the 2024-25 Champions League kicked off on 9 July.

Multiple players involved in the Euros had less than a week between representing their countries in Germany, and starting the new season with their clubs.

Romania played their last-16 match against Netherlands on Tuesday 2 July, losing 3-0 to the Dutch in Munich. Just a week later, on 9 July, or five days before the Euro 2024 final, three of the players from Romania’s Euro 2024 squad were playing in the Champions League first qualifying round with their club, FCSB.

Midfielders Darius Olaru and Adrian Șut, as well as goalkeeper Ștefan Târnovanu all started for FCSB just a week after Romania were knocked out of the Euros, with Olaru getting a hat-trick in a 7-1 win away at Virtus of San Marino.

Georgia’s captain, Guram Kashia, played every minute of all four of his nation’s games at Euro 2024 before they lost in the last 16 to Spain on 30 June. He went straight back to his club Slovan Bratislava and on 10 July he played a full 90 minutes for them as they won 4-2 in Champions League qualifying. His club-mates David Strelec and Juraj Kucka were in the Slovakia squad that lost to England on 30 June, and were also back in action 10 days later.

This “never-ending season” series starts today with an explanation of how the new Champions League will work. You’ve probably heard that it’s based on the “Swiss Model” of competition, but actually it’s not, it’s just been revamped to include more games and, hopefully, introduce more jeopardy.

An actual Swiss model would pair the most closely matched teams together on matchday one, then continuously assess each team’s quality and keep pairing similarly matched teams across the group phase.

I’ll explain how the new format actually works below, and how lucrative it could be for the clubs going deep into it.

Next week, in part two of this series, I’ll be trying to explain how next summer’s Club World Cup will work. As things stand, we don’t know where the matches will be played, and there are no TV deals or sponsors confirmed but I’ll report what I’ve been told by various sources about the funding and viability of that event.

And part three of the series will delve into the possibility of player burnout for those who are perpetually involved at the highest level for their clubs and countries across multiple competitions. I’ll also be exploring what player unions are doing to try to address concerns that there is simply too much football.

First up, how the new Champions League will work, with the group stage starting next Tuesday, 17 September.