UEFA against the champions? An evaluation of the recent reform of the Champions League qualification

The paper evaluates the impact of the only reform in the Champions Path of UEFA Champions League qualifying system, effective from the 2018/19 season. In contrast to previous studies, our methodology considers five seasons instead of only one to filter out any possible season-specific attributes. The chances of some national champions decrease much stronger than suggested by the reduction in the number of available slots. Since the negative effects depend to a large extent on the arbitrary cutoffs in the access list, we propose to introduce some randomness into the determination of entry stages.