A Final Four for football, forever transforming the final stage of the Champions League. He writes it on New York Times, telling that the UEFA is reflecting on the introduction of a new format for the semifinals and finals, which could be played in the future in a single venue and one week apart.
Thus would be born the “Champions Week”, an entire week around the final challenges of the Champions League, with concerts, events and more, which hopefully can generate substantial revenues both for the host city and, above all, for UEFA itself.
In any case, according to the US newspaper, the European Football Association will not discuss it this week, even if many representatives assure that the idea is taken very seriously.
Football would thus replicate the model of basketball, where the format of the Final Four: semifinals on Friday, final on Sunday, as has been the case for some time in the Euroleague or in the American university championship, as well as in most national cups in Europe.
In the case of the Champions League, the timing would obviously be longer (one week, in fact), but would involve the revolutionary elimination of the double semifinal round, replaced by a single match as happens for World Cup O Europeans.
But UEFA would not only be inspired by basketball, but also by American football. The idea is to make the “Champions Week” an event comparable to Super Bowl, especially from the point of view of the involvement of the public before the matches, and in general during the week preceding the grand final.
“Sponsors would love it”, he has declared Tim Crow, consultant in the sector, “It would replicate the Super Bowl model, where the game itself is not as important as the week before it”. Analysts also believe that the greater audience for this type of matches would be such as to compensate for the loss of revenue resulting from playing one game less (the two second leg semi-finals).
In any case, no changes can take place before 2024, the year in which the new Champions League. However, the top European competition has already experienced competitions of this type, in the famous Lisbon “bubble” in August 2020, where from the quarter-finals onwards they played on dry races up to the final, all in the same venue.
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