Carlo Ancelotti has just nailed the utter pointlessness of the Champions League | OneFootball

Five-time Champions League winner Carlo Ancelotti has publicly said what we all quietly believe – that the competition is increasingly boring and losing interest.

Ancelotti is now the manager of Brazil, having left Real Madrid in the summer. The Italian coach previously won the Champions League with both Madrid and AC Milan during his glittering managerial career.

Now looking at the competition with an outsider’s perspective, Ancelotti has nailed just why the Champions League is losing some of its allure.

“Seen from the other side of the world, the Champions League has the usual favourites: Real Madrid, PSG, Manchester City, and Bayern Munich,” he told TuttoSport.

“We’ve seen matches with high goal [margins] and such results make us lose interest. This first phase has been expanded to make it more interesting yet it’s not turning out that way.”

The expansion of the competition to 36 entrants and the introduction of the Swiss System, where teams play eight group matches instead of six, has dulled the Champions League’s edge.

While the old 32-team format was criticised, this was largely because of the financial inequality between Europe’s richest clubs and the rest rather than the set-up itself.

We are now faced with the absurd situation where England has six teams in the competition’s group stages, none of whom had to qualify via any play-offs.

In the last few days, these six clubs have won five matches and drawn one between them, scoring 16 goals and conceding just three.

This is the second time in 2025-26 that Premier League clubs have almost swept the board. Their financial dominance is such that playing any non-elite European club is easier than a trip to Craven Cottage.

This season could be a freak occurrence, with Tottenham winning the Europa League despite finishing 17th in the Premier League.

But it was UEFA’s craven decision, in the immediate aftermath of the Super League proposal, to introduce an extra two qualifying places for Europe’s ‘best-performing’ leagues.

With coefficients as they are, this is always likely to favour England, Spain, Germany and Italy – the four leagues that already have four automatic qualifiers. Nineteen of the 36 league phase teams come from just four countries.

It’s these fixtures – like Newcastle v Athletic Bilbao and Tottenham v Villarreal – that are the most unnecessary, the result of greed and politics rather than genuine sporting reward.

At heart, they are Europa League quarter-finals. Their presence in the Champions League is at the expense of the Austrian, Croatian, Polish, Scottish, Serbian and Swiss champions.

Meanwhile, teams like Pafos, Qarabag, Kairat and Bodo/Glimt from Europe’s fringes have been a credit to the competition.

UEFA previously reduced the size of the Champions League, cutting the second group stage in 2003-04 after concerns about player fatigue and fan disinterest.

Just over 20 years later, bloated formats are back with a vengeance. The league phase is a procession for the monied elite, postponing any jeopardy in the competition until late February.

At its best, European football is a mind-broadening experience of playing unfamiliar teams in unfamiliar places.

The treadmill-esque repetition of London, Paris, Munich and Madrid does nothing to sustain long-term interest in the competition.

Our proposals would include returning to 32 teams, cutting the number of entrants from Europe’s big leagues to encourage variety and encouraging jeopardy to make every match a genuine event.

Alas, the toothpaste is out of the tube. But Ancelotti’s diagnosis of a tedious competition blighted by stat-padding favourites is characteristically perceptive.