The UEFA Champions League is the major European club football competition organised by the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA). It contains 32 teams, hence the national champions of most UEFA associations have to play in the qualification to receive a slot in its group stage. The paper evaluates the impact of reforming the Champions Path of the qualifying system, effective from the 2018/19 season. While it is anticipated that the reduction in the number of berths decreases the probability of advancing to the group stage, the distribution of the losses among the national associations can only be estimated via Monte-Carlo simulations. In contrast to previous studies, our methodology considers five seasons instead of one to filter out any possible season-specific attributes. Almost all of the 45 countries are found to gain less prize money on average. Several champions, including the Cypriot, the Swiss, and the Scottish, might face a loss of over one million Euros. Since the negative effects depend to a large extent on the somewhat arbitrary differences between the positions of the access list, we propose to introduce some randomness into the determination of entry stages.
翻译:欧洲足联冠军联盟是欧洲足球协会联盟(欧足联)组织的主要欧洲足球俱乐部竞赛,它由32个球队组成,因此大多数欧洲足联协会的国家冠军必须参加资格赛,才能获得组级赛位,该文件评估了2018/19年季节生效的资格赛改革 " 冠军之路 " 的影响,虽然预计泊位数目的减少会降低进入组级的可能性,但国家协会之间损失的分配只能通过蒙特-卡洛模拟来估计。与以往的研究不同,我们的方法认为五个赛季而不是一个赛季可以筛选出任何可能的季节特有特征。几乎所有45个国家都发现平均获得的奖金较少。包括塞浦路斯、瑞士和苏格兰在内的几个冠军可能面临100万欧元的损失。由于不利的效应在很大程度上取决于准入名单地位之间的某些武断差异,我们提议在进入阶段的确定中引入某种随机性。