Two seasons into the Champions League’s great reformatting, the league phase has settled into its own rhythm: a 36-team table that nobody can quite hold in their head, producing January nights of genuine jeopardy and September nights of pure arithmetic.

The case for: more matches between the historic heavyweights, earlier. The case against: a points spread so wide that the top eight is effectively settled by Matchday 6, and the real competition — the race for ninth through twenty-fourth — is happening in the table’s undergrowth where the cameras rarely point.

What the table hides

Arsenal’s perfect six from six leads a top eight with no surprises in it. The fascination is below: Sporting’s away record, Newcastle’s goal difference swings, the four-way mathematics of the playoff cut-off. The format’s defenders say this is the point — more teams alive, later. They are not entirely wrong.

What has genuinely changed is squad economics. Eight guaranteed league-phase matches reshaped how clubs budget a season, and the knockout playoff round in February has become the most consequential fortnight in the European calendar. The dead rubber is not dead. It has simply moved.