Champions League shake-up: explainer on the big changes approved by Uefa

A new format has been approved for the Champions League after years of debate about the best way forward for the competition. Here is an in-depth look at the changes.

The biggest changes to the Champions League in a generation, starting from the 2024-25 season. A 36-team league phase will replace the current 32-team group phase. Each team will play eight matches instead of the current six. They will play four home and four away, against eight different opponents under a seeded 'Swiss system’.

The top eight in the league go straight to the last-16 knockout round as it is now – with the next 16 teams in the table entering a new play-off round for the remaining eight spots. In all, it means an increase in matches from 125 to 189.

Two of them will go to clubs who have not qualified by the conventional route, but are the next-best finishers in the countries with the two best collective coefficient scores from the previous season. This score is calculated by awarding points for the performance of a country’s clubs in European competition. In four out of the past five seasons, this would have meant England gaining an extra place.

Uefa had previously proposed that these two places would be awarded based on an individual club’s coefficient score, based on performance over five seasons. This met with the approval of the European Club Association but was fiercely opposed by Europe’s domestic leagues and by fans’ groups, who said domestic performance alone should determine qualification and that it created a further safety net for the continent’s heavyweight clubs. It also created the possibility of big teams leapfrogging smaller teams who had finished above them into the top competition.

The third extra place in the new format goes