UEFA and the 36-Team Blueprint: Who Really Pays for a Tidier Calendar?

On September 15, in Thessaloniki, representatives of UEFA's 55 member associations will sit in a hall with no spectators. On the table is a blueprint that will change how European national-team football operates from 2028: a Swiss-model table of 36 teams, each playing six matches, used for both the Nations League and the qualifying rounds for the Euro and the World Cup. No more four-team groups, no more symmetrical home-and-away schedules. Just one single ranking table running through the season, where every matchday can shift the position of nearly the entire competition.

I spent years reading federation meeting minutes before I read scorelines. That experience taught me one thing: when an organisation claims to be reforming for sporting quality, look for the broadcast rights contract signed a few months earlier. It is usually there.

Context: three layers of pressure on one document

The first layer is the sporting problem UEFA cites. In its argument, the gap in level between national teams causes many groups to lose competitiveness very early. When one group has a dominant side and three teams fighting for second, the last two rounds are often mere procedure. With a shared 36-team table, each team still plays six matches, but opponents are drawn by seeding pots, so matches between strong teams increase and lopsided fixtures are said to decrease.

The second layer is broadcast pressure. UEFA states plainly that the number of notable matches does not currently meet the demand of broadcasters, the customers who pay most of the rights money. A qualifying campaign with six groups, three of them already decided by matchday four, is a hard product to sell. The Champions League has long been one of UEFA's most important revenue sources, and replicating that model at national-team level is seen as a way to strengthen the organisation's position.

The third layer, the least discussed, is the calendar race with FIFA. FIFA has moved first: from the start of the season to the end of the year, national-team dates are compressed into two windows instead of three, with the late-September window holding four matches in a single camp and October freed up. That squeezes the club break to roughly 15 days. Any UEFA design from 2028 must fit inside that frame.

How a 36-team table actually works

The Swiss model is not new to European football. The Champions League has used it since 2026-25: one single table, each team facing eight different opponents, results added to a shared ranking. What is new is that UEFA wants to apply that logic to national teams, where there are no transfers, no club budgets, and the only significant revenue is broadcast rights and competition sponsorship.

Three parameters determine the entire quality of this product.

The first is how the seeding pots are drawn. With 36 teams split into six pots, each team faces one opponent from each other pot, flattening the schedule by coefficient. The 36th-ranked team will not face only top-ranked sides, and the top-ranked team is not exempt from facing lower-ranked ones. This is the mechanism that reduces lopsided matches, exactly as UEFA claims.

The second is how many places qualify and how many are relegated. This is the biggest blind spot in the current design. If 36 teams play one shared table, where is the line between advancing and elimination drawn, and how many teams are pushed down a tier? The blueprint has not published this detail. Without it, nobody can simulate whether the competition will be compelling or dull.

The third is how six matchdays are spread across the windows. Six matches in two windows means three per camp, a density never seen at national-team level in the modern era.

There is an under-discussed technical paradox. The Swiss table is designed to reduce lopsided matches, yet the shared ranking itself lives on goal difference. When goal-difference gaps are compressed, the incentive to follow the smaller matches shrinks too. The product becomes more even, but also flatter.

Based on my experience tracking matches in the Champions League group phase across multiple seasons, the share of matches decided by three goals or more has not fallen as sharply as UEFA claims. That does not make the Swiss table worse than the old system; it simply means no public simulation data backs the sporting benefit UEFA is promoting. Every figure about fewer one-sided matches remains a claim, not a published spreadsheet.

A note on the history of the Nations League, since it is the direct premise. It was created to replace meaningless friendlies with genuinely competitive matches, backed by promotion and relegation between tiers A, B, C and D. After several cycles, it has proven one thing: when a match has consequences, audiences return. It has also proven the opposite: when a team has already secured survival or relegation by matchday four, the last two rounds are just as empty as before. The 36-team design is meant to fix precisely that weakness, by extending consequence to the final matchday for more teams.

The money: who pays, who receives, who is left out

Set the sporting claims aside and what remains is a sales problem. UEFA needs more matches between big national teams, because those are the fixtures broadcasters pay the most for. A 36-team Swiss table produces more of them than a four-team group system, while the total number of matches per team stays at six. UEFA is not selling more football; it is repackaging the same quantity of football so that it looks more expensive.

The distribution consequences are clearer. A 36-team table means only 36 federations sit in the direct beneficiary group, while UEFA has 55 members. For the remaining 19, the only route into the shared table is a preliminary round or a promotion mechanism that has not been published. At club level, the tension between the Champions League's market pool and solidarity payments to smaller leagues has been contested for years. The new design risks replicating that structure at national-team level.

UEFA's existing solidarity payments to smaller federations act as a cushion. When the competition is reorganised around a single table, that cushion easily comes to be seen as a cost to be cut. Money in sport appears twice: once when it enters the account, and once when it appears in court. There is no court here yet, but there is also no published distribution table.

The timing is telling. The FIFA and UEFA election cycles fall in 2027, a year before the new format is due to launch. A reform passed before an election is a political asset, and also a financial commitment to broadcasters in the next rights cycle. That does not make the blueprint wrong, but it explains why time pressure outweighs data pressure.

It is worth repeating that across all the relevant documents, not a single concrete number appears for rights values, revenue-split ratios or solidarity payments. That absence is the most important fact. A reform reshaping the competition structure of 55 federations without an attached money table is an incomplete document, no matter how polished the sporting section is.

The contrarian angle

The easily overlooked point is that the smaller federations may be the strongest supporters of the new format, not its opponents.

For a federation ranked around 40th in Europe, the current four-team system usually delivers two matches against strong sides across a campaign, plus four against peers. The new format, if paired with promotion, could give them six matches against pot-drawn opponents, including at least two against top sides and three against comparable ones. In domestic rights revenue, that may be a genuine improvement, since every match against a big side is a chance to sell high.

The risk lies elsewhere: autonomy. When the entire national-team calendar is bundled into a single product sold by UEFA, smaller federations lose the right to negotiate individual matches and depend entirely on how UEFA splits revenue. Clean is not the same as transparent. One is a scent; the other is double-entry bookkeeping. The new format may be clean on the pitch while remaining murky in the accounts.

The second contrarian point concerns the big teams themselves. Six qualifying matches in two windows, plus a compressed club season, creates a load national-team coaches have never faced. For countries with thin squads, this is ideal breeding ground for muscle injuries and for calling up players who are not ready. Any team forced to reuse a group of players across three consecutive internationals faces a higher probability of re-injury. Demanding that a player returning from injury prove himself in his very first match back is the fastest route to sending him to the treatment room again, and the new format will create more such situations.

The third contrarian point sits with the audience. A 36-team table creates a sense of continuity, but it also creates distance between viewers and the table. When every matchday can shift a dozen teams' positions, the casual viewer struggles to track who is competing with whom. The four-team system has drawbacks in competitiveness, but an advantage in storytelling: a group is a clear story, with one leader and one chaser. The new design trades storytelling for match volume. That is a rational commercial choice, but not a free one.

What to watch

The 36-team blueprint will almost certainly pass, because it serves exactly the group with the loudest voice in the room: the big federations and the broadcasters. What matters is not whether it passes, but three details that will decide the final product: the advancing and relegation boundaries, the revenue-split formula, and the number of matches per camp.

None of those three appears in any communiqué so far. They will appear, but possibly late, after the sporting section has been warmly received by media and after federations are bound by public commitment.

Records do not lie. People build records to speak lies for them. Whenever a federation announces a new format without an accompanying money table, the most important part of the document is still in the drawer.

For Vietnamese football, this development deserves attention from one specific angle. When continental and world competitions are reorganised around large tables reserved for the strongest group, the slots available to smaller regions tend to become the last variable negotiated. How UEFA draws the line between the top 36 and the rest will set a precedent for how other confederations handle the same question. Watching it is not a matter for European fans. It is a matter for any football ecosystem currently standing outside the meeting room.