UEFA Champions League Reforms Could Kill Premier League’s ‘Race For Fourth Place’

Arsenal currently hold the fourth spot in the Premier League, but their north London rivals Tottenham Hotspur are right behind them.

Spurs’ good recent form has led some pundits to suggest that they will overtake Arsenal between now and the end of the season to take the final Champions League spot. The race between those two will be one of the main Premier League talking points this April and May, but if it were to happen in 2024 or 2025, it might not attract the same interest.

That’s because a new format for the Champions League has just moved one step closer, and that new format could, in some seasons, eliminate the “race for fourth place” in the Premier League.

The European Club Association, which looks after the interests of Europe’s (largest) soccer teams, has agreed on changes to the Champions League from 2024-25 onward. It has sent the proposal to UEFA for UEFA to discuss next month, and that proposal is expected to be approved.

Once of the proposed changes enlarges the Champions League to 36 teams, rather than the current 32, and two of those extra places will go to teams based on their “historical significance” rather than their performance in the previous season.

Essentially, that means if a club has a high enough ranking within UEFA, it could finish outside of the standard Champions League spots and still qualify.

To use the Premier League as an example, if the team that finishes fifth is the best ranked team to have not already qualified, then it would get one of those two spots. If the team that finishes fifth isn’t the highest ranked team, it doesn’t get that spot.

If the team in fifth earned one of those two spots through its UEFA ranking, then the team in sixth could get the other spot if its UEFA ranking is also high enough.

As all of the Premier League’s “big six” of Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur have high UEFA rankings, it is feasible that they could all qualify for the Champions League if they all made up the top six in the Premier League. In fact, according to The Athletic, this is exactly what would have happened if the proposed system had been in place in the 2017/18, 2018/19 and 2019/20 seasons.

UEFA and the “big six” teams all benefit from this new proposal as it increases the chances of those teams being in the Champions League, and thus increases their revenues as well as making the competition a bigger draw for UEFA.

But at the same time, it could make the Premier League less dramatic.

There are essentially four battles each season in the Premier League: the battle for the title, the battle to be in the top four, the battle for the other European spots, and the battle to avoid relegation. The new Champions League proposals mean that in some seasons, one of those battles could effectively not exist.

That would mean less interest in Premier League matches involving several of the “big six”, the league’s biggest draws, in the latter stages of the season, especially if one of the teams strolls to the title like Manchester City have done in recent years. Last season, with the relegation fight also wrapped up relatively early on, the only drama at the end of the season was Leicester’s battle with Chelsea for the final Champions League spot.

At the same time, should a team like West Ham United or Leicester City finish fifth or sixth, they wouldn’t get a place in the Champions League as they wouldn’t have a high enough UEFA ranking. Manchester United would benefit from finishing fifth, but Leicester would not.

This in turn gives the current “big six” sides more chances to improve their UEFA rankings and benefit from the Champions League revenue, meaning as time goes on, it could become even harder for clubs like Leicester and West Ham to challenge their dominance, again making the Premier League a less exciting competition.

These changes could see the Premier League getting fewer viewers than it might have otherwise done, especially if the top sides don’t play their star players once Champions League qualification is assured. Those clubs might earn more money from the new Champions League format, but the loss of prestige of the Premier League could cut into those extra profits as TV and sponsorship deals are not as high as they might have been.

Ever since the European Cup became the Champions League in the 1990s, its format has been changed to benefit Europe’s larger teams, and there is nothing to suggest that this latest proposed change will be the last.

But while clubs want to remove as much risk as possible to their income, it is precisely this risk that makes fans watch sport, and without it, more and more fans could start switching off.