The move from eight groups of four to a single table of thirty-six changed more than the fixture list. It changed what a result is worth, when clubs need to take risks, and how the whole first phase should be approached.
A lot of the coverage treated it as a cosmetic reorganisation. It isn't, and the differences are worth understanding.
What changed structurally
Under the old format, each team played six matches against three opponents, home and away, and needed to finish top two of four. Your fate was almost entirely determined by three specific rivals.
Now each team plays eight matches against eight different opponents, and is ranked against thirty-five teams they mostly haven't played. Top eight go straight through. Ninth to twenty-fourth enter a playoff round. Below that, out.
The most important consequence is that your position depends on results in matches you're not involved in, to a degree that simply wasn't true before.
The strength-of-schedule problem
Here's the genuinely novel issue. Every team plays a different set of eight opponents, drawn from pots, but there's still considerable variation in difficulty within that structure.
Two teams can finish on the same points having faced schedules of meaningfully different difficulty, and the table doesn't adjust for it. That's an inherent unfairness in any incomplete round-robin, and with only eight matches out of a possible thirty-five, the schedule is very incomplete.
Clubs are aware of this and it affects planning. Knowing in advance whether you have a hard or soft draw changes your points target and therefore how you approach specific fixtures — particularly whether to rotate for a domestic match.
Every match matters more, and less
An interesting tension. In the old format, a single defeat in a group of four was serious — you had six matches and needed roughly ten points.
Now, one defeat in eight is more absorbable. There's more room to recover. In that sense individual matches matter less.
But because the table is so tightly packed — with thirty-six teams separated by narrow margins — a single point can move you several places, and the difference between eighth and ninth is the difference between a direct route and two extra knockout matches in a congested February. In that sense every point matters enormously.
The practical effect is that dead rubbers have largely disappeared from the first phase. Under the old format, a team that had qualified with a game to spare would rest everybody. Now almost everyone has something to play for until the final round, because seeding positions remain live.
That's genuinely good for the competition and it was the main argument for the change.
The eighth-place cliff
The most consequential structural feature is the gap between eighth and ninth.
Finishing in the top eight means going straight to the round of sixteen. Finishing ninth to twenty-fourth means a two-legged playoff in February, adding two matches in an already crowded period, with the risk of elimination against a decent opponent.
For a club also competing domestically, two extra European matches in midwinter is a substantial cost — travel, recovery, injury exposure, and squad rotation pressure across a critical league period.
This creates a real strategic question in the final rounds of the league phase. A club sitting tenth with two matches left faces a genuine decision about how hard to chase eighth, weighed against domestic priorities.
Scheduling asymmetries
A detail that gets little attention. With eight fixtures against eight different clubs, four home and four away, the home-and-away split isn't symmetrical across opponents.
You play some opponents at home only, others away only. That means a team can face the strongest opponents in their schedule all away, and the weakest all at home, or the reverse.
Given home advantage is worth a meaningful amount, this is a non-trivial source of unfairness that no seeding system can fully eliminate. It's the price of the format and it was known in advance.
What it means for smaller clubs
Mixed, I'd say.
The positive is that with thirty-six teams and eight matches against varied opposition, a club from a smaller league has more routes to points — you're not trapped in a group with two elite sides and dependent on beating one of them.
The negative is that the extra matches and the playoff round increase the physical and financial demands, which weigh more heavily on squads with less depth. A club with eighteen usable players facing eight league-phase matches plus a February playoff is stretched in a way a club with twenty-five isn't.
Whether the net effect favours competitive balance is genuinely unclear and will take several seasons of data to assess properly. My suspicion is that it slightly favours the larger squads, which is the opposite of what the format's defenders claimed, but I'd hold that loosely.
How to read the table
One practical note for anyone following it. Mid-table positions during the league phase are much less informative than they look, because teams have played different opponents.
Points per match adjusted for opposition strength is the meaningful measure, and it's rarely displayed. A team on nine points from a brutal schedule may well be better placed than one on eleven from a gentle one, and the standings won't tell you that.