The third Champions League under the new format has just been drawn and, at this point, it is difficult to argue that UEFA's experiment has failed. One may debate whether the league phase of the so-called Swiss format is more elegant than the old four-team groups, or whether we really needed to watch even more football matches. What is considerably less debatable is that, as a commercial product, the new Champions League works very well.
The 2024-2025 season produced a figure that explains much of what is happening in European football. UEFA brought in 5,014 million euros, surpassing five billion for the first time in a season without a European Championship, and its club competitions contributed 4,414 of those millions. The organisation attributes much of the growth precisely to the new format of its men's tournaments.
It is worth understanding exactly what changed, because the shift does not simply consist of replacing eight groups with a 36-team standings. The real economic innovation was manufacturing more premium inventory without formally creating a new competition. Each club went from six to eight matches before the knockout rounds, more clashes between big clubs appeared, four additional participants were added and, above all, UEFA managed to extend the period during which each club has something meaningful at stake.
The result is a considerably larger commercial machine. Global audiovisual rights for the Champions League increased by around 20 per cent in the cycle that began in 2024 compared with the previous one, and commercial rights grew by 25 per cent. The Financial Times also noted that UEFA observed double-digit audience growth in major markets during the first season of the new system: TNT Sports, for example, recorded a 28 per cent increase in reach in the United Kingdom and a 7 per cent rise in minutes consumed.
But there is something even more interesting behind those numbers, which is that UEFA did not simply sell more matches: it managed to increase the economic value of some of them. To understand this, one must recall the flaw that plagued the old Champions League. Its group stage was straightforward to follow, but commercially it wasted matches. Each team played six fixtures against its three group opponents and, as November wore on, a particularly unattractive commodity would emerge for any broadcaster: matches whose outcome barely mattered.
The new format attacked exactly that problem. In the first season of the league phase, only Liverpool and Barcelona had mathematically secured direct qualification to the round of sixteen before the final matchday. Seventeen teams reached that matchday still able to finish in the top eight, and 25 could still reach the playoffs. That allowed UEFA to turn the final matchday into something resembling a national league's closing round: 18 simultaneous matches and a standings table that shifted constantly. From a fan's perspective it may seem like pure entertainment; from the perspective of a rights buyer it is something else entirely: television inventory with uncertainty. And uncertainty sells.
Added to that is sheer volume. The previous Champions League produced 125 matches from the group stage to the final, while the new system generates 189 including the playoffs: 64 additional matches. UEFA found, in other words, oil beneath ground it already owned.
Naturally, persuading clubs to accept playing more matches required sharing a significant portion of the increase with them. The Champions League currently has around 2,467 million euros to distribute among participants in the competition and the Super Cup, within a European system that foresees annual gross revenues close to 4,400 million. Each participant in the league phase receives 18.62 million euros before even considering results, and from there a considerably more aggressive incentive structure begins: wins, draws, final position in the standings and progress through the knockouts. A club that wins the competition can accumulate more than 100 million euros from UEFA alone before adding gate receipts and certain commercial revenues associated with its run.
The distribution architecture has also changed in an important way. The old market pool and the historical coefficient have been integrated into what UEFA calls the value pillar: around 914 million euros are reserved for performance-related payments and around 853 million for the value component. That matters because the competition is still not economically neutral. Winning matters, but so does being big. A Real Madrid, Bayern, Liverpool or Paris Saint-Germain does not enter the Champions League with the same capacity for economic exploitation as a club from a small league: their international audience, their television market, their coefficient and their ability to fill a stadium with premium-priced tickets turn each additional European match into a far more profitable asset. The same additional fixture is not worth the same to everyone.
And here begins the less comfortable part of the experiment, because the Champions League has grown richer at the same time as European football has grown more unequal. UEFA insists, correctly, that the growth does not remain exclusively among the participants. Solidarity payments to men's clubs increased substantially with the new cycle: in 2024-2025 they reached around 465 million euros, 193 million more than the previous season, and for 2025-2026 the system reserved 308 million solely for clubs not participating in UEFA competitions. That is not a marginal sum.
The problem is that this solidarity is attempting to correct an inequality that the Champions League itself is simultaneously helping to increase. For a major European club, qualifying consistently means receiving tens of millions of additional euros every season. That money makes it possible to sign better players, sustain higher wages and amortise more expensive transfers, which in turn increases the probability of finishing in a Champions League position in their domestic championship once more. Money flows in again and the mechanism feeds itself. UEFA distributes part of the surplus downwards, but it distributes far more to those who participate: under the current model, 93.5 per cent of net revenues from the centralised men's competitions goes to the clubs that contest those competitions. That is why the relevant question is not whether solidarity exists — it does, and it has grown — but whether it grows fast enough to offset the competitive financial effect of Champions League money within domestic leagues. The answer is far less obvious.
There is, moreover, a bill that does not appear in UEFA's accounts. Revenues are relatively easy to measure; the physical cost of the product is not. A club that previously played six matches in the opening phase now plays eight, and if it finishes between ninth and twenty-fourth place it adds a two-legged playoff that previously did not exist. Paradoxically, failing to finish in the top eight can turn the Champions League expansion into four additional European matches compared with the old format. For large clubs the marginal financial cost of those fixtures is perfectly manageable: travel, hotels, security or opening the stadium represent small amounts against the revenues generated. The scarce resource is not money.
It is the footballers.
FIFPRO has spent years warning that the simultaneous expansion of the Champions League, the Club World Cup and international competitions is pushing certain players towards seasons of 70, 75 and potentially more than 80 matches between club and country. Here a peculiar economic feature of modern football emerges: almost every industry responds to increased demand by increasing the utilisation of its assets, and football is doing exactly the same thing, except that its primary assets are human beings. A data centre can increase utilisation, an airline can try to fly its planes more hours and a factory can add another shift, but a midfielder cannot play indefinitely three matches every seven days. The Champions League has discovered how to monetise the calendar more effectively at the precise moment when the calendar is becoming the industry's scarcest resource.
To that physical bill a second externality is added, one that rarely accompanies the figures quoted for the new format: each additional European Tuesday and Wednesday competes indirectly with domestic leagues. Not necessarily for audience in the same time slot, but for economic significance. Thirty years ago, the national championship was the central product of a major European club and the European Cup was the reward for having won it; today the relationship is beginning to look dangerously close to the reverse, with the domestic league progressively becoming the qualification mechanism for the economically superior product. The more money the Champions League generates, the more important it becomes to qualify, and the more important it becomes to qualify, the greater the financial distance between clubs that enter regularly and those that remain outside.
There is considerable irony in all of this. UEFA has spent years fighting projects such as the Super League by arguing that they threatened the competitive ecosystem of European football, but its own commercial response has consisted of building a Champions League that incorporates some of the economic characteristics that made that idea attractive: more matches between big clubs, greater income predictability, more audiovisual inventory and a European competition that is increasingly central to the economy of elite clubs. It is not a closed Super League, but it is looking more and more like an open super league. The difference is significant from a sporting standpoint; from an economic standpoint, considerably less so.
None of this means the new format is a failure. If anything, the opposite is true. After two seasons, the available evidence suggests that UEFA was correct in its commercial diagnosis: there was demand for more Champions League football, broadcasters were willing to pay for it, sponsors were too, fans continued consuming it and the unified standings managed to sustain sporting uncertainty for longer. Meanwhile, the aggregate revenues of European clubs reached 28,600 million in 2024 and UEFA expects them to surpass 30,000 million. European football has never generated so much money.
Perhaps that is why the debate is framed incorrectly. The question is no longer whether the Swiss format works, because it does. The question is how long the strategy behind it can keep working. For decades, football's answer to almost any economic problem has been to produce more football: more competitions, more participants, more knockout rounds, more matchdays, more international markets and more television windows. The 2024 Champions League demonstrated that there was still money to be extracted from the calendar, but it may also have demonstrated something more important: European football is approaching the moment at which adding another match will continue to increase revenues but will begin to reduce the value of everything else.
And when that happens, the industry's truly scarce asset will no longer be television rights.
It will be a free evening.
