Louis van Gaal and the 36-Team Champions League: Right Diagnosis, Wrong Remedy

In August 2026, when Vietnamese football returned after the first lockdown, I sat in my office in Hai Phong and reopened my personal tracking sheet for a 19-year-old defender named Nguyen Van Hop, who had been loaned out to a Second Division club. His successful pressing rate was 23% above the league average. It was a beautiful number, beautiful enough to make people forget the context: five months of suspended football, and a young player's fitness and psychology had gone through a shock that no spreadsheet could measure. I advised the club not to promote him to the first team immediately. At the end of the season, Van Hop tore his cruciate ligament.

That story came back to me when I read Louis van Gaal's latest remarks on the Champions League format. At 75, the former Netherlands and Bayern Munich coach has kept his blunt style to the point of discomfort: "Any Tom, Dick or Harry can take part," "UEFA only thinks about money," "a corrupt world." Amid those noisy lines, there is one argument worth pausing on longer than the rest: he says the calendar is too dense, and that leads to more injuries.

I tell the Van Hop story because it is a miniature version of what van Gaal just said, at a much larger scale.

To understand why van Gaal's remarks go beyond the grumbling of an old man about the modern era, we need to look at the specific circumstances of the Champions League format from the 2026/25 season.

UEFA changed the format from the traditional group stage to a single league phase of 36 teams, with each team playing 8 matches instead of 6. On top of that is a preliminary play-off round before the knockout stage. In organisational terms, this is an expansion: more teams, more matches, more places.

Van Gaal looks at that and sees three problems.

He argues that too many teams are admitted, diluting the quality of the competition. "Any Tom, Dick or Harry can take part," he says. In his theory, if only the best teams were involved, the quality gap between matches would narrow and the technical level would rise. He concedes this might mean fewer goals, but in exchange for matches at a higher level.

He proposes a tiered model borrowed from ice hockey: dividing teams into A, B and C classes based on playing strength. He says UEFA is "hiding behind" the Europa League and the Conference League to avoid confronting the core problem.

And he talks about the calendar: too many matches, leading to more injuries. "I told UEFA that 20 years ago, but they do not listen to me," he recalls.

What is notable is that Goal.com, the outlet reporting this, provides no data to verify any of van Gaal's claims. There is no injury-incidence figure, no comparison of match load, no data on average goals per match across seasons. The article simply records the remarks. And as I have learned over years of covering youth football, a claim without data is a claim that needs to be excavated.

Of van Gaal's four arguments, the one about the calendar and injuries is the only one that can be verified by sports science. It does not depend on feelings about "beautiful football" or "tradition"; it can be measured through soft-tissue injury incidence, accumulated match load, and recovery days between games.

Mechanically, going from 6 to 8 league-phase matches is a 33% increase in matches at that stage. Add the preliminary play-off round, and a team may have to play two or three more matches than under the old format before reaching the knockout stage. For teams with many internationals, this compounds with national-team and domestic-league schedules, creating a season of unprecedented fixture density.

Sports science has long shown that when the gap between matches drops below 72 hours, soft-tissue injury incidence rises significantly. This is why coaches rotate squads regularly, and why player unions across Europe have repeatedly raised the calendar issue. Van Gaal is not the first to say this, but he is one of the most credible on timing: he has coached across four decades and claims to have warned UEFA 20 years ago.

I have a personal reason to believe this argument. In 2026, tracking Van Hop remotely through data, I saw the risk before it happened. He had good pressing numbers, but those numbers were produced during a period when his body had lost momentum after five months off. When football returned, pushing him into a dense fixture schedule was like sowing a seed in compacted soil. The plant may grow, but the roots will break.

Data is only the topsoil; I dig deeper to find the groundwater. A 23% successful pressing rate is not enough to conclude Van Hop is ready for the first team. It only shows he played well in a specific context. What was that context? Weaker opponents, lower pressure, and a body in transition. Van Gaal is saying the same thing about the Champions League at a larger scale: 8 matches may not sound like much compared to 6, but the context of those 8 matches is the problem.

The problem is the article provides no data to prove it. No injury figures are cited. No comparison of match load between seasons. No data on average recovery days. Van Gaal offers a hypothesis with a plausible mechanism, but no quantitative evidence accompanies it. And by my principle, belief only has value when it passes the qualifying round of evidence.

In Vietnam, a similar problem exists at a smaller scale but with an identical mechanism. Youth tournaments are often organised at a dense pace to keep up with the season, and players aged 17-19 end up playing every 3-4 days during the crunch period. I once saw a young midfielder from Hai Phong play 5 matches in 12 days at the U19 national qualifiers, then pick up an ankle injury in the sixth. Nobody recorded that figure. Nobody compared it with his match load across the season. And he disappeared from the first-team squad a year later.

Van Gaal says that if only the best teams took part, matches would have "fewer goals, but at a higher level." This is an analytically defensible argument. In a match between two elite sides, the quality of decision-making per possession rises, while entertainment density - goals, swings, shocks - falls. Van Gaal is proposing a connoisseur's product against a broadcast product.

But this is exactly where he loses from the start. The 2026/25 format was designed to maximise jeopardy and goal volume, because that is what broadcasters pay for. A single 36-team table creates more meaningful final-day matches, more potential swings, and more stories to sell. Van Gaal is asking UEFA to abandon its core business model in pursuit of an aesthetic standard no customer pays for.

I have made a similar mistake in the opposite direction. In 2026, when Morocco reached the World Cup semi-finals, I doubted their data: only 38% possession, low passing, few chances created. By my old method, they were a team "not worthy." But after rewatching all five of their matches, I realised their high press generated transitions three times faster than other teams at the tournament. I was wrong to rely only on possession. I had to write a series of self-corrections to fix it.

The lesson from that mistake is: one match does not make a talent, but it illuminates exactly where to dig. With van Gaal, I am not saying he is wrong analytically. I am saying he stands on the other side of a values debate where data cannot adjudicate. He wants fewer goals for higher quality. UEFA wants more goals for more revenue. Both are right within their own frame of reference.

This is where I think the most serious problem in van Gaal's argument lies. He complains that the quality gap between teams is growing. That may be true. But his proposed solution - tiering teams into A, B and C classes based on playing strength - will not narrow that gap. It will freeze it.

The reason is simple: to classify a team into Class A, you need a ranking mechanism. In European football, the most feasible mechanism is the historical coefficient based on multi-year results. But the historical coefficient is precisely the instrument favouring clubs with deep traditions. Use it to tier, and you hand them a permanent place at the top. The quality gap van Gaal complains about becomes a structural feature of the competition, no longer a phenomenon to be corrected.

The ice-hockey model he invokes is a closed-franchise model of the North American kind. European football operates on an open model, where access is earned through domestic performance. This is why UEFA has never adopted his proposal - not because they "do not listen," as he says, but because it conflicts with the European Sports Model, a principle defended by both UEFA and EU institutions.

I have seen a small version of this problem in Vietnamese youth football. In 2026, I followed U19 Viettel and saw Tran Danh Trung score 12 goals in 18 matches at the U19 National Championship. That figure was far above the norm. I built a tracking table of six secondary metrics and found he only exploded against bottom-table teams, while going completely quiet against Hanoi or SLNA. The quality gap in youth football is not in the number of goals, but in whose net you score them. Had I used the 12-goal figure to place Danh Trung in the "Class A" of youth football, I would have repeated the mistake van Gaal is making at European scale.

There is an irony of position that few mention. Van Gaal is a Dutch football figure. His proposal would reduce guaranteed access for mid-tier associations - including Dutch clubs, who currently benefit from the expansion to 36 teams. He is proposing a solution that could harm his own homeland's clubs. The article does not put this question to him.

Van Gaal says UEFA "only thinks about money" and lives in a "corrupt world." These are strong lines, but they need to be read for what they are.

Mechanically, the direction of the criticism is correct. The new format creates two additional guaranteed home-and-away matchdays for each participant, plus an extra knockout round. In broadcasting terms, that is additional sellable inventory from the same 36-club pool. It is a revenue-maximising design, whatever the intent of the designers.

But the article provides no revenue figure. No distribution model, no evidence of specific wrongdoing. The word "corrupt" is a value judgment, not an evidenced allegation. No payment, tender, vote or contract is cited anywhere in the article. Legally, a general criticism of an institution is ordinarily non-actionable. Analytically, it should be treated as a statement of values.

And this is the point I think analysts are missing: the real economic question is not volume, but distribution. The core financial tension of the expanded format is whether incremental revenue flows disproportionately to clubs with high historical coefficients - entrenching the very quality gap van Gaal laments - or is redistributed downward. The article raises the symptom and ignores the mechanism.

If incremental revenue flows to the big clubs, the new format not only fails to narrow the quality gap, it widens it. If revenue is redistributed, it could be a genuine solidarity instrument. Nobody in this debate provides the numbers. And when there are no numbers, every argument is just belief.

What is notable is that even the clubs benefiting from the new format regularly complain about the calendar. They are the direct recipients of revenue from the additional matchdays, but also the ones facing the fitness consequences. This contradiction is not hypocrisy; it is a structural problem. Clubs are stuck between two interests: short-term revenue and long-term player health. And in most decisions, the short-term interest wins.

The most notable sentence in the article, to my mind, is this: "I told UEFA that 20 years ago, but they do not listen to me."

It is notable for two reasons. First, it establishes consistency of view: van Gaal is not someone who emerged to oppose the format after it was adopted, but has held this view for two decades. That is a credibility asset.

Second, it confirms he has no institutional channel. All the roles the article references for him are past roles: former Netherlands coach, former Bayern Munich coach. He holds no office at UEFA, a club or a federation. That means his remarks carry no institutional weight and no negotiating leverage. They function as moral commentary from outside the system.

The article's description of him as "characteristically blunt" is itself a form of expectation management. It pre-codes the remarks as a product of personality, not grounded analysis. That lowers the perceived threat they pose and spares UEFA from having to respond.

No formal consequence is expected. And that is a shame, because his workload argument - the only one verifiable with data - deserves more serious consideration.

This is the part I care about most, and also the part analyses of the Champions League format usually skip.

When the calendar densifies, big clubs have two choices: rotate the squad, or push young players onto the pitch. In theory, rotation is the sensible solution. In practice, thin squads - teams that just about qualified for the Champions League through domestic performance - often lack the depth to rotate. They must use young players to fill gaps in matches they cannot afford to lose.

This creates a paradox: the expanded format gives more clubs a Champions League chance, but those very clubs face the heaviest match-load pressure relative to squad depth. And young players are the first pushed into the gap.

I have seen this at a much smaller scale. In Vietnamese youth football, when a team must play a dense schedule, coaches tend to bring young players in to save the senior core. The youngster plays well for a few matches, then is pushed into a streak of consecutive games his body is not ready for. The injury comes when he is used at the wrong time.

In Europe, leading academies like La Masia or Ajax typically run load-management programmes for young players, capping minutes and consecutive matches. But mid-tier clubs - the ones just about qualifying for the Champions League - lack the resources for such programmes. They need the youngster to play now, and he plays now. The difference between a top academy and a mid-tier club is not just transfer money, but the ability to protect young players from the club's own needs.

The youth cohort is a living archaeological layer; each season scrapes off a stratum, and I do not rush to conclusions. But watching how European clubs rotate under the new format, I see a familiar pattern: young players are brought in when needed, and pulled out when not. That is extraction, and I see in it no sign of development.

Van Gaal talks about injuries at a macro level. But the layer hit hardest by injuries is not 30-year-old stars with insurance contracts, but 19- and 20-year-olds trying to win a place in the squad. They have no voice, no negotiating union, and no history of protection.

The counter-intuitive point I want to make is this: van Gaal is right on the diagnosis, but wrong on the cure. And wrong in a way more dangerous than mere technical error.

His A/B/C model does not just fail to narrow the quality gap; it turns that gap into law. It hands the big clubs a permanent place at the top, while keeping the dense calendar at that level. He does not solve the workload problem he himself raised. He only makes it harder to see.

Moreover, his "UEFA only thinks about money" argument, though directionally correct, has an unintended side effect: it reinforces the argument of clubs wanting to break away into a Super League. Clubs who believe they subsidise the rest of European football will hear confirmation in van Gaal's criticism. His anti-institutional stance inadvertently sides with people he probably does not want as allies.

And there is an uncomfortable truth: the strongest constituency for his view is not youth academies or small associations, but the historical elite - clubs who see expanded access as dilution of their revenue. Van Gaal, self-styled defender of football quality, is inadvertently aligned with the very clubs his critique targets.

When the pitch is empty, I listen to the data. It lies more than I once thought. And in this case, the data does not lie - it simply does not exist. No injury data, no revenue data, no distribution data. Only a 75-year-old man saying what he believes to be true, and a newspaper recording it without verification.

That does not make his remarks wrong. It only makes them insufficient to change anything.

I do not want to ask whether the Champions League should return to the old format. I want to ask: if the diagnosis on workload is correct, who pays the price for nobody listening?

I have seen the answer at a small scale. It is a 19-year-old defender tearing his cruciate ligament after being pushed into a schedule his body was not ready for. At Champions League scale, the answer will be hundreds of young players like that, every season, for years.

And looking back, what I find worth thinking about is not the change of format, but the distance between speaker and listener. Van Gaal spoke 20 years ago. UEFA listened, or did not. Either way, football keeps operating by its own logic, and young people remain the most compressed geological layer.

Perhaps what we need is not a new format, but a mechanism by which warnings - from anyone - are verified by data rather than dismissed because the speaker no longer holds office. When a correct warning is ignored, the one who pays is not the one who said it.