UEFA against the champions? An evaluation of the recent reform of the Champions League qualification

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the impact of the 2018/19 reform of the UEFA Champions League qualification system, revealing that most countries earn less prize money and proposing a stochastic approach to entry stage determination.

Contribution

It introduces a multi-season Monte Carlo simulation to assess reform effects, considering season variability and proposing a randomized entry system.

Findings

Most countries earn less prize money post-reform.

Champions from Bulgaria, Scotland, and Switzerland may lose significant revenue.

The impact varies greatly depending on arbitrary cutoff points.

Abstract

The UEFA Champions League is the major European club football competition, however, most national champions have to play qualification matches to receive a slot in the group stage of the tournament. The paper evaluates the impact of the only reform in the Champions Path of the qualifying system since 2009, effective from the 2018/19 season. While it is anticipated that the reduction in the number of berths decreases the probability of advancing to the group stage, the distribution of the effects among the national associations is revealed here via Monte-Carlo simulations. In contrast to previous studies, our methodology considers five seasons instead of only one to filter out any possible season-specific attributes. Almost all countries are found to gain less prize money on average. Several champions, including the Bulgarian, the Scottish, and, especially, the Swiss, might lose million Euros. As the consequences depend to a large extent on the arbitrary cutoffs in the access list, we propose to introduce some randomness into the determination of entry stages in the qualification.