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The 2016 UEFA European Championships will be the first edition to have 24 teams in it. This is an upgrade from the absolutely perfectly working 16-team knockout.
What this means is that roughly half of UEFA’s 53 member nations will qualify for the Euros, and that 24 competitors will now mean an off-balance tournament, and a very off-balance qualifying segment. It is quite possible to get through the group stages in both without winning a game.
The new format is the brainchild of former great footballer Michel Platini, who has also introduced an overhaul of one competition (the UEFA Cup into the Europa League), tweaks to another (Champions League qualifying) and brought in Financial Fair Play (FFP).
Many have derided the Europa League, pointing out that its paltry reward, combined with its fixture largesse, exacerbates its already bloated nature and asks too much of the mid-tier and low-tier clubs’ already strained finances.
FFP, too, has had its fair share of criticism for its lack of gumption, being a half-hearted regulation that is all show and little go, allowing clubs still too much financial leeway. Conversely, some have also argued it is merely a measure to ensure the elite clubs’ position among the top.
Although, to be fair, the intended sanctions of FFP are only starting to be implemented as the regulation works on a medium-term basis, punishing clubs if they breach the limitations over the course of three seasons or so.
On the other hand, not much that I’ve seen or read has gone against Platini’s Champions League tweaks, although it wouldn’t be too hard to see if Platini’s aim – to have more clubs from outside the traditional nations take part – has been bearing fruit. These tweaks have been in place for a number of years, so there’s the beginnings of a solid base of evidence.
From the get-go, however, Platini’s changes to these Euros are yet another example of modern sport administrators’ undying crusade to dilute the quality of competitions. First of all, for a sport that’s by far and away the most popular sport across Europe there is no need to expand the competition to encourage new markets, unlike the Rugby Championship, for example.
Secondly, although mid-tier nations may reach their first ever finals, their presence will inevitably downgrade the overall quality of the tournament, lessening the essential tournament ingredient of tension. Yes, one may argue that the World Cup is filled with crap too, but at least there’s still that mystery and awe that comes when Japan play Senegal, Greece play Costa Rica or Chile play Switzerland. Scotland versus Spain is a less intriguing and a far more predictable meeting.
Platini has expanded anyway, from the very workable 16-team finals format to the askew 24-team tournament, where there’ll be six four-team groups. That means 12 teams will go into the round of 16, with four teams to be found from teams that finish third in their group. A 16-team, or a 32-team tournament like the World Cup, is perfectly fine as the group stage splits the teams equally.
By expanding it to 24 teams, it means that qualifying has to be changed to allow eight more teams to progress. The planners firstly have to negate the tricky problem of funnelling 53 nations into 24 spots. First of all, the member nations are placed across nine groups of six teams each, with one group having only five (remember that there’s actually 54 UEFA member nations, but the hosts France don’t have to qualify).
In previous editions, the nine group winners went through, along with the best second-placed team, and the eight remaining second-placed teams playing-off to reach the finals. Now, there’s many possibilities in which a team can get through to France without having to win any of their qualifying games.
It goes without saying that is far from ideal. Safe to say, with such easy qualifying, there will be no repeat of last time around, when Romania, Turkey and Hungary finished within three points of each other on an exciting last matchday of qualification for the 2014 World Cup.
The important thing to conclude is that Platini’s new plan is so fresh that it hasn’t even finished its first week. Criticism of the clunky amount of teams will hang around, but it is quite possible that including eight more European teams will be a masterstroke, with maybe a few big names falling to less-pointier sticks of the lesser footballing nations.
The general high standard of European football also means that the football is often quite entertaining, and the games are generally quite tight affairs, so again Platini might be right in trying to dig a grave only to find more treasure. Taking a look at the European teams, there’s slightly more than 16 quality teams.
First of all, there’s the usual western European quality – England, France, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Switzerland (that’s nine teams). Below that tier, we can add the milieu of good-but-not-great footballing nations of Europe: old powerhouse Russia, successful sleep-inducers Greece and their eternal rivals, Turkey, the most-summery Scandinavian nation Denmark, and a handful of former Yugoslavian and Warsaw Pact countries (Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, Czech Republic and Ukraine).
Together with the first nine nations, that gives us 18 nations, and to that we can add surprise packets Iceland, as well as four other mediocre teams featuring one or two fantastic players (Armenia, Montenegro, Sweden and Wales) – making 23 nations in total.
Furthermore in Platini’s favour, the European Championships have shown us before their capacity to shock, with Greece and Denmark being outside lights to have won in recent editions. Also, changes introduced to the Champions League qualifying has led to more minnows reaching the group stage, and the tale of the underdog is a timeless story everyone loves seeing repeated, especially journalists. An example would be Cypriot team APOEL reaching the quarter-finals a couple of years ago.
One important caveat, though, to that hope, is that the 16-team format worked splendidly, with big names failing at times and small names succeeding in the finals. Although the last one was a bit of a stinker, the 16-team Euros were generally belter tournaments with tense games, due to a consistent quality of the teams across the tournament. Michel Platini has gone and changed that.
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