Arne Slot is on course to win the Premier League in his first season as Liverpool head coach, but sadly he won’t be doubling it up with the Champions League.
The Reds saw their European campaign come to a gut-wrenching end at Anfield on Tuesday night as they lost on penalties to Paris Saint-Germain, who showed their quality over the two-legged tie to eliminate the team who’d finished top of the newly-expanded league phase.
Winning their opening seven matches in the tournament ultimately counted for nothing for LFC, who by finishing first had theoretically the ‘easiest’ potential route to the final, although the reality turned out to be rather different.
Slot suggests Champions League change
As he sifted through the wreckage of last night’s European exit – reflecting with pride on how Liverpool performed upon their return to the Champions League this season – Slot put forward a possible tweak to the format of the competition for UEFA to consider.
He suggested (via liverpoolfc.com): “It is something now to take into consideration about how much worth it is to end up first in the league table if you can face Paris Saint-Germain in the next round. It is what it is.
“Maybe I am [speaking] too soon now but maybe it would be more fair that after the round in between, the one that wins the league table plays against the team that is lowest position after the teams have played.
“That is also because we were so unlucky to play Paris Saint-Germain because we could have also gone to the other side of the draw. In the end, if you want to win the tournament, you have to beat teams like Paris Saint-Germain, and that’s what we didn’t do today after an incredible first 90 minutes of football from us.”
Does the Champions League format need tweaking?
It highlights a flaw in the Champions League format that the team who finished 24th in the league phase (Club Brugge took the lowest position to advance to the knockout rounds) are still in the competition when the side who ended top are now out of it.
Is there merit to Slot’s suggestion that the pairings for each round should only be determined after the conclusion of the previous stage, with favourable weighting given to the higher finishers in the league phase? Possibly, even if the current format does the latter to an extent.
Liverpool were indeed unfortunate that one of the teams in the 15th-18th bracket was PSG, whose high standard of performance over the two legs against the Reds (as highlighted by Rio Ferdinand) begs the question as to how they finished so low in the previous stage of the tournament.
It’s something of an anomaly with LFC in the Champions League that, when they won the trophy in 2005 and 2019, they just about scraped through the group phase; a role reversal from other years in which they’d blitz through the opening round only to come undone at the first knockout hurdle.
UEFA aren’t likely to change the format of their club competitions so soon after the radical overhaul for this season, but Slot has certainly offered food for thought for those in European football’s HQ.
