Champions League Final during the UEFA Champions League Final between Juventus and FC Barcelona at Olympiastadion on June 6, 2015 in Berlin, Germany.

After plenty of scuttlebutt surrounding the creation of a possible European Super League earlier on this year, negotiations for the format of the UEFA Champions League took on a different tone. And now, it appears that the power Europe’s most powerful clubs have has given them a boost, which will see a major change in the qualifying format for the Champions League.

32 teams will still participate in the group stage, but half of them will now come from the Top Four leagues in Europe, as decided by UEFA coefficient. Currently, only the top three leagues get four Champions League berths, and the fourth placed team from those leagues has to play in a qualifying playoff to reach the group stage. Currently, that would mean the best four teams from La Liga, the Premier League, Bundesliga, and Serie A would all automatically qualify for the group stage. There is no word on how qualification for the other 16 spots would be determined.

Apparently, representatives from Europe’s biggest clubs had demanded even more than just that change. Their demands had included certain clubs be given entry on “historic merit”, which would allow big clubs who had terrible seasons to qualify for the competition anyway even though they wouldn’t deserve it, games to be played on weekends for better TV ratings, and the formation of a new entity co-owned by UEFA and the big clubs to run the competition. UEFA, which currently doesn’t have a president, did well to prevent the big clubs from wholly exerting their influence and creating what would have been a Super League clone anyway, and for the time being, this at least prevents the creation of one until 2021.

While this is bad for clubs in smaller leagues such as in France, Portugal, Russia and others, it does at least for the time being prevent European soccer’s oligarchy from breaking away and playing among themselves. Why is this happening? Money. The big clubs want more money and they’re not getting it from having APOEL, BATE Borisov, and Ludogorets Razgrad playing against Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, and Juventus.

The alternative would have been horrible for the sport, so this solution, hopefully temporary, at least will do the trick for now.

[ESPN]

About Matt Lichtenstadter

Recent Maryland graduate. I've written for many sites including World Soccer Talk, GianlucaDiMarzio.com, Testudo Times, Yahoo's Puck Daddy Blog and more. Houndstooth is still cool, at least to me. Follow me @MattsMusings1 on Twitter, e-mail me about life and potential jobs at matthewaaron9 at Yahoo dot com.