Football official wants Champions League entry shared wider
With four places likely to be added to the Champions League starting in 2024, the president of the European Leagues group is working to ensure those extra spots go to smaller teams instead of more clubs in England or Spain.
UEFA is close to finalizing a plan that would increase the number of teams in the Champions League from 32 to 36, abolish the traditional group stage and give teams more money from 10 guaranteed games instead of six.
The latest proposal for adding teams would give one spot to the the third-place team in the fifthranked nation, currently France, plus three teams ranked highly by their UEFA coefficients that didn't qualify.
"It must not be allocated to one of the big five associations," European Leagues president LarsChrister Olsson said of the coefficient places Thursday at an online conference organized by the Financial Times, referring to England, Spain, Germany, Italy and France.
The 30-nation European Leagues group wants UEFA to share Champions League access and prize money more widely to help support domestic competitions, and avoid widening the wealth gap.
"We actually are preferring the champions from Scotland, Denmark or Switzerland, for example, to qualify rather than Team No. 6 from England or Spain," Olsson said at the FT Business of Football meeting.
When Olsson spoke Thursday, the four teams hypothetically in line to benefit from the proposed new Champions League entry system were Lyon, Liverpool, Borussia Dortmund and — as a high-ranked national champion — Salzburg, according to league standings and UEFA rankings.
If Olsson's preferred entry path applied today, the four would be Lyon plus the champions in the leagues ranked Nos. 11-13 by UEFA — Scotland, Ukraine and Turkey. The current leaders in those leagues are Rangers, Dynamo Kyiv and Galatasaray.
The European Leagues group is in a contest to influence UEFA with the European Club Association, which typically pushes for storied clubs to get a bigger share of entries and prize money.