Champions League Group Stage: The Heavy Favorites Almost Always Advance

The UEFA Champions League is back in full force today with eight group stage games — hooray! Look, I love the Champions League. It’s the best club soccer in the world, featuring the best players and teams all pitted against one another. From a sports blog standpoint, it’s also the best since it provides valuable mid-week, mid-afternoon #content.

There’s a lot to like … but …

Let’s be honest, the group stage until the final one or two matches is a mostly rote affair. That’s not to say the games don’t provide compelling moments and plenty of human drama, but the way the competition is set up heavily helps the favorites. In a lot of ways, the Champions League is the anti-underdog competition, although you could argue how many underdogs actually exist in a competition with “Champions” in its title?

A lot of this has to do with money and a self-perpetuating cycle. The best players in the world want to play for clubs in the Champions League. Teams that qualified for the Group Stage in 2013-14 pocketed $11 million. Last year’s winners, Real Madrid, made close to $80 million for winning thanks to performance bonus clauses stipulated by UEFA. This season UEFA set aside a little over $11 million for the 32 Group Stage teams (plus performance bonuses with wins and draws). Teams advancing to the knockout rounds pocket around $4.5 million..

In turn the European elites: Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern Munich and 2-3 English teams continue to qualify for the tournament, continue to make money and continue to attract the best players. As long as they continue to qualify and advance it keeps their respective team and league UEFA coefficient high, giving them a better seed for the draw each year. (The Champions League draw is 32 teams divided into four pots based on each teams UEFA coefficient — hardly an exact science.)

The modern, 21st century of the Champions League, rarely produces a totally surprising champion or set of finalists. The last unusual final came in 2003-04 when Jose Mourinho’s FC Porto defeated AS Monaco. In the decade since that surprise, the road through the Group Stages has been fairly predictable.

How predictable?

Dating back to the 2004-05 Champions League, only nine teams seeded in Pot No. 1 failed to advance to the knockout rounds. (Only twice have teams in Pot 1 finished fourth in their group.)
Of the 160 teams to advance to the knockout rounds in the last decade, only 37 have emerged from either Pot 3 or 4. (At least five from Pots 3 & 4 have advanced in the last three competitions.)
The only true outsider to advance in this time was Cypriot team APOEL in 2011-12. APOEL emerged from a group featuring Porto, Shakhtar Donetsk and CSKA Moscow. APOEL’s UEFA coefficient was 13.12. For comparison Manchester United, the top seed, had a rating of 151 that year.

The Champions League Group Stage format remains very forgiving for the favorites. Six games spread out from September through December gives teams plenty of time to recover for one bad result, when the top two teams in a group of four advance. Plus, it produces three additional home games to sell tickets. UEFA awarding $1.2 million for each win in the Group Stage isn’t too shabby, either.

To crack through to the top echelon or wind up in Pot 1 you need a lot of money or your country’s league to continually do well in both the Champions League or Europa League, to bump up the coefficient. Portugal’s Europa League success is why Porto and Benfica landed in Pot 1 this year. Meanwhile PSG can spend all the money it wants and keep winning Ligue 1 but it won’t wind up in Pot 1 unless it, likely, wins the tournament or sees other teams from the French league do well in European competitions.

If there’s going to be a Group Stage “upset,” odds are it will come when a traditionally strong club lands in Pot 3 as we’ve seen in recent seasons with teams like Manchester City, Borussia Dortmund, Juventus and this season, Liverpool. Mostly, though, expect the favorites to move on.

The real drama and excitement of the Champions League doesn’t start today, regardless of what the operatic theme song (brought to you by Heineken) might make you believe. We have to wait until February and the knockout rounds for that.