UEFA are set to make a tweak to the Champions League next season, just one year after introducing . The came to its conclusion in Munich on Saturday night as in the competition by thrashing Inter Milan.


The match brought to an end the first season of the new league table format, which appeared to be a success for UEFA. While the final was one-sided, the organisers of European football still managed to combine the expanded 36-team format with plenty of dramatic matches.


But it seems that they are , in which 36 teams compete in a league table phase to decide which sides make it into the knockouts.


In , a team's ranking in the league phase determines their seeding for the play-off round. It means the top eight teams get a bye to the round of 16, where they take on a play-off winner and enjoy home advantage in the second leg.


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However, home advantage is decided by random draw after the round of 16 due to UEFA's preference for an 'open draw', so teams who performed better in the group stage could find themselves forced to play the home leg first at the quarter-final or semi-final stage.


That is exactly what happened to this season. The Gunners were extremely impressive in the league phase, finishing third, ahead of in 11th and in 15th, yet they were still handed away draws for both the quarter-final and semi-final second legs.


Although they smashed Real 5-1 on aggregate, ’s side reportedly voiced their displeasure over the situation, having felt aggrieved that their consistency in the league phase wasn’t rewarded in the knockouts.



Their complaints haven’t fallen on deaf ears, with German newspaper Bild reporting that UEFA have all-but decided to change the way they draw the knockout ties. The UEFA Club Competitions Committee met on Friday and reportedly agreed on the proposed change before the Champions League final – and final approval is now 'considered a formality.'


Other changes were also considered, including proceeding directly to penalty shoot-outs instead of extra time and preventing two clubs from the same nation from facing off until the competition's later stages. No consensus was reached on those ideas, though.


Arsenal weren’t the only club to fall foul of the ‘open’ draw system: at home for the first leg of their quarter-final against , despite finishing second in the league phase.



HAVE YOUR SAY! What do you make of the proposed changes? .


The Gunners were knocked out by eventual winners PSG in the semi-finals, but Arteta refused to accept the French side were the dominant side. “100 per cent I don't think there's been a better team [than Arsenal] in the competition from what I have seen, but we are out,” he said.


"This competition is about the boxes and in both boxes are the strikers and the goalkeepers and theirs was the best in both games."


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