The Champions Cup must return to the format that proved popular in the past, writes SIMON BORCHARDT.
I’ve always believed that if you need to run a format explainer video before and during a tournament, then your format is flawed.
The first of these videos I recall seeing was when Super Rugby fatefully ditched its simple league format for a convoluted conference system that signalled the beginning of the end for what was once rugby’s best provincial/club tournament.
Sanzaar paid a big price for fixing something that wasn’t broken, and the EPCR seems to have made the same mistake with the Champions Cup.
Pre-Covid, Europe’s premier club tournament had an easy to understand format. The 20 teams were divided into five pools of four, with teams playing home and away matches against their pool opponents (six matches each). The pool winners and the best three runners-up then progressed to the quarter-finals.
Covid prompted a format change during the 2020-21 tournament, which you can understand, but the EPCR has strangely not gone back to what worked so well.
In the 2022-23 Champions Cup (the first to include South African sides), the 24 teams were split into two pools of 12. Teams played home and away matches against just two of the sides in their pool (four matches each), with the top eight qualifying for the round of 16.
This season’s format was a slight improvement, with four pools of six teams, and teams playing four of those in their pool (two home and two away). But then it got complicated. To determine the round-of-16 fixtures, the four pool winners were ranked from one to four, and the other 12 teams from five to 16 based firstly on their ranking in their pool and then on the number of log points they had accumulated. So the team ranked one will play 16, with two up against 15, and so on.
It became evident that this ranking system was a bad idea when five of the last-16 matches were a repeat of earlier pool clashes (Bordeaux vs Saracens, Northampton vs Munster, Bulls vs Lyon, Stormers vs La Rochelle and Leinster vs Leicester).
I had to laugh when SA Rugby magazine shared the fixtures on its Facebook page and one of the first comments was ‘How were the playoffs decided, was there a draw?’ This confused fan must not have watched the explainer video, or most likely he did – several times – and still didn’t get it.
For next season, the EPCR must go back to what proved popular in the past. Have six pools of four teams each, with teams playing the other three in their pool home and away (six matches each). The six pool winners and the best two runners-up would then qualify for the quarter-finals (scrap the round of 16, which rewards mediocrity).
This format isn’t perfect, but at least it won’t require an explainer video.
Photo: Ashley Vlotman/Gallo Images