Howdy everyone! After a long pause in European football over the Christmas period, the UEFA Champions League is finally back. I will be posting next week’s fixtures later this week, but I wanted to share with you some ideas for this year, related to football competitions.
As you know, our UEFA pool is still running, and we are getting closer to the decisive matches. We have two more weeks in January of the phase group, with a thrilling last day on January 29th where 18 matches will be played at the same time. Then, 8 teams will qualify straight to last 16 round and 16 more will battle for the other 8 spots in the play-offs in February. At the end of February will have the winner of this pool.
Once this phase group is finished, 16 teams will fight to win the European Champion title. This will run from March to May. My thoughts are to run a survivor pool with a 1000 sats buy-in and the possibility to re buy for 2000 sats prior to semifinals. In each round, apart from the final, two teams fight each other, home and away, and only one team qualifies for the next round. Last 16 round will be played 1st and 2nd week of March; quarterfinals will be played on the 2nd and 3rd week of April and semifinals will be on the last week of April and the 1st of May. Final will be played on May 31st in Munich.
Later this year, between mid-June and mid-July, FIFA will run a new competition in the US. 32 clubs from all over the world will be fighting to win the very first FIFA Club World Cup in this new format. They will be distributed in 8 groups, where the top 2 teams in each group will qualify for the Knockout stages. The last 16 teams will play single match eliminatories making their road to the final.
Almost coincidentally with this tournament, 16 European national teams will be playing in Switzerland, from July 2nd to 27th, to become the Women’s European Champions.
Regarding these two tournaments, I was considering to organize a pool where the stackers should predict results and winning points. At the end of both tournaments, the stacker with the highest number of points will win the sats in the pool. All sats collected from the posts will be added to the pool. No buy-in will be necessary
Then, we will close the circle again in September with the UEFA Champions League 2025-26, when the new season starts.
So, these are the plans with regards to the football in this year. Please feel free to leave your comments and thoughts about these ideas.