💰Celtic are counting their millions from the new Champions League... but Scottish football could pay a heavy price

Changes to Europe's most prestigious club competition are making the big fish in small ponds even larger

The revamped Champions League — with eight games per club in the “group phase” and then a knockout round before the last 16 — has its origins in the fact that many of Europe’s biggest clubs wanted more money.

Twelve of those clubs, including six from England, three from Spain and three from Italy, joined an ill-fated and short-lived attempt to start a breakaway European Superleague in 2021.

We don’t need to rehash in detail why that didn’t happen (fan protests and a lack of a coherent business model by the breakaway instigators), but even the existence of that plan was yet another sign to European governing body UEFA that they needed to innovate to keep the big guns on side.

It’s a purely personal view that the revamp has been, on balance, a good thing. The old format was hugely predictable, with eight groups of four playing six games each, mostly ending up with the two clubs with the largest wage bills in each group going through.

That doesn’t mean the new format is flawless; far from it. Just take a look at the 36-team league table at the end of the group phase and you can see that all the top 13 teams in that table — and 17 of the top 20 — are clubs from the “Big 5” leagues of Europe: the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, the Bundesliga and Ligue 1.

Money always talks in elite European football, and the Big 5 have the most money, by far. But I do think that the new format has given a new glimpse of possible success to some of the continent’s “smaller” clubs, such as Celtic.

This is not a slight on Celtic, obviously. They are a huge club. They became the first British club to win the European Cup, in 1967. But the economics of football in this media age have turned things on their head. I’ll also caveat the statement that Celtic have a glimpse of success now with the fact that they will next play Bayern Munich in the new knockout round, and will probably be eliminated.

But if that happens, they will still have played 10 matches before going out, against six under the previous format. And if they had been luckier with the draw, they might have fancied their chances of going deeper still.

Today’s analysis will dig into why this new format is, therefore, good for clubs like Celtic — or to put it another way, good for big fish in the small ponds of some of Europe’s lesser leagues.

But it will also consider how UEFA, inadvertently, are contributing to a process whereby those biggest clubs in those smaller leagues are increasingly dominant over their domestic rivals in a way that cements that dominance with every passing year.

Before we get to the hard data that proves this, here’s a stat for you.

Celtic are already guaranteed to make more money from this Champions League campaign — from UEFA alone, before a CL ticket or pie is sold, and before any extra commercial revenue they accrue from being at Europe’s top table — than SPFL rivals Hibernian, Kilmarnock, Motherwell and St Mirren will earn in revenue this season. Combined. From all sources.

I’ll return to those numbers shortly.

I’ll also be examining:

• Reasons the new format is good for clubs like Celtic.

• Why it increases their chances of progress (to some extent at least).

• How big fish in small ponds will only have their status cemented at home.

• The cash sums CL clubs are already guaranteed ahead of the knockout round.

• The distorting effect of UEFA cash, compared to domestic cash.