Fans fume at UEFA's new Champions League plans with group stage totally revamped

dailystar.co.uk:

Champions League plans have not gone down well amongst the football community.The governing body of European football announced on Tuesday (May 10) that from the 2024/25 season onwards, their premier competition would be reformatted with the group stage becoming a 36-team league phase.

It will involve each team playing a minimum of eight games, instead of the current six, with the top eight progressing to the knockout stage automatically.

Those in ninth to 24th place will then compete in a two-legged play-off to earn qualification, while the rest are eliminated.

As well as there being an extra four teams, the other major change is that club coefficients will no longer impact access to the competition.After the changes were confirmed by UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin, one fan replied: "What a f***ing stupid format." A second comment read: "Better than originally proposed, but still a bad idea based upon #greed of @UEFA. #UCL should be for max of 2 clubs per league (supposed to be for #Champions!) Clubs that fail in 1 competition should not be parachuted into #UEL or #UECL.