Some of our early groups were pretty tough. One year Real Madrid, Dortmund, City and Ajax were all in the same group. All of which were Champions of their respective league.Reality is, when you’re as good as City are at the minute, any group format you can think of is going to be a boring, no jeopardy, stroll to the knock out stages.
If this was the Mancini days, when getting out of the group was considered a major achievement, we would have been in a better position to judge if it’s an improvement or not.
But hard to say when both formats are almost certainly going to produce the same predictable outcome.
Just wait until they do the 'draw' for 9th to 24th....I'm looking forwards to seeing a Juve v A Mardid. We'll never see that kind of game in the preliminary knockout round tho.If one of the 'big guns' don't make it through they will fine tune it with a WILD CARD directive based on 'istory or some made up coefficient shit.
With us being top of UEFA's coefficients we're not getting any benefit from the success we've had under the previous format. However Villa who are way down the rankings have benefited a lot. They probably have a set of easier fixtures than we do.
When we first won the League we didn't get in Pot 1 for the following season's CL, that was changed to Pot 1 teams being the CL winners and the league winners from the highest ranked European Leagues.
Now we've got the highest ranking it's been changed again. I think teams shouldn't play others from the same pot, there has to be some reward for winning a domestic league.