This week sees the Champions League begin again in earnest, with a new format for all players and managers to get to grips with – something that one Liverpool ace isn’t best pleased about.
For whatever reason, UEFA in this case – but FIFA are guilty of it too – have looked to tweak the competition to, one assumes, make it more exciting for the supporters.
In the early stages of previous iterations of the competition, there would be high-ranking European teams playing against minnows.
It’s believed that the idea of the recent changes are to ensure that more ‘top’ teams play each other from the get go, and therefore the competition is a much more exciting, rather than predictable, venture as a result.
That’s as maybe, but it’s clear that Reds keeper, Alisson Becker, is none too impressed.
?? Alisson on new Champions League format: “For the supporters, amazing. But sometimes nobody asks the players what they think about adding more games…”.
“Maybe our opinion doesn’t matter at all”. pic.twitter.com/hvR8lubHKk
— Fabrizio Romano (@FabrizioRomano) September 16, 2024
“For the supporters, amazing (the new format),” he was quoted as saying by CaughtOffside columnist and transfer expert, Fabrizio Romano, on X (formerly Twitter).
“But sometimes nobody asks the players what they think about adding more games… Maybe our opinion doesn’t matter at all.”
It’s not the first time that players or managers from European football’s more successful sides have fired a broadside at the governing bodies, though they always seem to fall on deaf ears.
One only needs to look at how tired some of the players were during Euro 2024 to understand that there are far too many games being played across a season now.
Domestic, European and international commitments all combine to place incredible strain on players that are often expected to play two games a week for months at a time.
Any gaps in a season now appear to be taken up by meaningless friendlies, and the start of the 2025/26 season begins just three weeks after the conclusion of another newly-reformatted competition, the FIFA Club World Cup.
Top photo by Michael Regan/Getty Images
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