Club coefficients in the UEFA Champions League: Time for shift to an Elo-based formula

TL;DR

This paper proposes replacing the UEFA club coefficient with an Elo-based rating system to better predict team performance and ensure balanced competition in the revamped UEFA Champions League format starting in 2024/25.

Contribution

It introduces an Elo-based rating model that incorporates national league games, demonstrating improved predictive accuracy over traditional coefficients.

Findings

Elo-based ratings outperform traditional coefficients in match prediction

Inclusion of national league data enhances rating accuracy

Recommends UEFA adopt Elo-based formulas for fairer team assessments

Abstract

One of the most popular club football tournaments, the UEFA Champions League, will see a fundamental reform from the 2024/25 season: the traditional group stage will be replaced by one league where each of the 36 teams plays eight matches. To guarantee that the opponents of the clubs are of the same strength in the new design, it is crucial to forecast the performance of the teams before the tournament as well as possible. This paper investigates whether the currently used rating of the teams, the UEFA club coefficient, can be improved by taking the games played in the national leagues into account. According to our logistic regression models, a variant of the Elo method provides a higher accuracy in terms of explanatory power in the Champions League matches. The Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) is encouraged to follow the example of the FIFA World Ranking and reform the calculation of the club coefficients in order to avoid unbalanced schedules in the novel tournament format of the Champions League.