All you need to know about the Champions League format changes

The Champions League is set to undergo drastic changes to its format.

Europe's premier club competition will soon boast a bigger field, a revamped group stage and make several other tweaks to its traditional set-up.

Read on for everything you need to know about the changes.

What are the main changes to the Champions League format?

The first key change to note is that the field size for the Champions League will be increasing from 32 teams to 36 teams.

Two of those four extra spaces will be allocated to the two nations whose sides had the best collective performance in Europe during the previous season.

Another place goes to the team that finishes third in UEFA's fifth-highest ranked league (currently France), while the final extra berth will go to the winner of the next-highest league not to have already qualified.

Also, UEFA are scrapping the group stage altogether and instead introducing one single league phase involving all 36 sides.

Each team will play eight matches — four home and four away — over a 10-week period, with the top eight after those fixtures qualifying automatically for the knockout stage.

Beyond that, the teams ranked from ninth to 24th will meet each other in eight two-legged play-off matches to try and secure their place in the last 16.

Finally, the bottom-ranked eight sides will be eliminated.

UEFA also announced that teams from the same nation can now face each other at any point of the competition.

Previously, such clashes could not occur until the quarter-final phase at the earliest.

When is the Champions League format changing?

The new Champions League format is set to be introduced by UEFA in the 2024-25 campaign.

The upcoming renewal of the competition in 2023-24 will be the last to run under the traditional format, meaning fans still have some time to get their head around the changes.

Why are UEFA changing the Champions League format?

When making the initial announcement, UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin stressed that the changes are designed to help improve the competition in terms of entertainment.

However, Ceferin and his colleagues did backtrack on initial proposals which had suggested some teams would be able to qualify based on historical performance rather than recent achievements.

That policy was scrapped, with Ceferin saying: "UEFA has clearly shown today that we are fully committed to respecting the fundamental values of sport and to defending the key principle of open competitions, with qualification based on sporting merit."

The intention is also to offer more entertainment for fans, with the 189 matches set to be played representing 64 more than under the previous format.

Are these changes happening in the Europa League and Europa Conference League too?

Yes. UEFA's other two leading club competitions are also adapting a 36-team field from 2024-25 and scrapping the group stage in favour of a league structure.

However, the Europa Conference League will see sides only play six games in the initial phase rather than eight.