BRENDAN Rodgers insisted last night that Celtic can progress to the last 16 of the Champions League despite drawing Barcelona, Manchester City and Borussia Monchengladbach in the group stages – if they can win their home games.
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Uefa announced significant changes to their flagship Champions League yesterday, saying they had managed to “keep it in the family” after staving off the threat of a breakaway league by Europe’s top clubs.
“I know the people, the club, the media, most of the players – the emotion is there, but it happened with Bayern”.
For a while, Germany only sent three teams to the Champions League, but they surpassed Italy and, in recent years, Serie A has been the fourth league without a fourth representative team. Liechtenstein is the only UEFA member without a national league while clubs from Kosovo are not participating at present as their facilities are considered below standard.
The changes affect the top four domestic leagues in UEFA’s ranking, which are now Spain’s Primera Liga, Germany’s Bundesliga, England’s Premier League and Italy’s Serie A, and will initially run until 2021.
The fourth ranked league, now Italy, have only two guaranteed places plus one in the playoff round.
The coefficient system, which is used to rank the leagues and clubs, will also change, although it shouldn’t endanger the top four leagues.
The other teams to qualify will be the Champions League and Europa League titleholders respectively. That means half of the group stage will come from four leagues.
The fourth-ranked league, now Italy, are the biggest winners.
This is especially generous given that Italian teams have lost in the playoff round for each of the last three seasons, most recently AS Roma who were beaten by Porto this week.
FC’s Steve Nicol presents a few of the Champions League groups to look out for in this year’s competition.
Borussia Monchengladbach and Celtic make up the pool with Guardiola adding: “We’ll have to make our best performance to go through to the next stage”.
Currently, 40 percent of revenue is distributed according to the so-called market pool, which is calculated according to the size of the television market in the clubs’ respective countries.
The Scottish champions overcame Israeli outfit Hapoel Be’er Sheva in a play-off to secure a spot in the Champions League.
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UEFA competition cycles remain in place for three seasons, so further changes would only be possible from the 2021-22 season onwards.
