In case you haven’t heard, the Champions League group stage is history, and on Thursday in Monaco, UEFA put on a show of strength in presenting the new reality for Europe’s elite club competition. There was a lot of talk about the minutiae of algorithms and the ‘Swiss model’ format, but the bigger picture stuff was never too far away — even if the stalled European Super League project, backed so determinedly by Real Madrid and perhaps the biggest factor in these changes being made, was only mentioned once . Still, that moment was probably the high point of the glitzy, star-packed ‘trailer’ played before the new ‘league phase’ draw actually got underway, when Zlatan Ibrahimovic almost uttered the words in full before UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin shushed him: “I told you.
This will never happen.” View this post on Instagram A post shared by UEFA Champions League (@championsleague) Ceferin and his European Club Association counterpart Nasser Al-Khelaifi (the Paris Saint-Germain president is a key ally in the ruling dynamic on the continent) could be seen joking together before and after the event — and the Ibrahimovic moment certainly brought plenty of laughter from the crowd at Monte Carlo’s Grimaldi Forum. When it came to the fixtures themselves, Gianluigi Buffon and a chatty Cristiano Ronaldo provided the star power on stage, with Ronaldo pressing a performative giant button that apparently launched an externally-developed computer model into ac.