Mate, I LITERALLY understood my own point as I closed by saying ‘I’m probably arguing for spectacle rather than speaking to competitiveness’.
It’s as easy as me saying ‘you’ve missed your own point as the dross didn’t qualify because they didn’t win their league’.
In the past, the best team in Portugal/Sweden/Russia could beat the best team in England/Italy/Spain over two legs. Now, those ‘lesser’ teams are suffocated by seeded groups with four teams from England, Italy, Spain etc.
Across a two legged tie you could see a match go against expectation. In a 6 game group, you won’t. A smaller team needs a miracle to get out of the group as they’re ran on threadbare squads with less talent and playing better teams.
It’s all well and good saying there are more good teams in it now. Of course there are. It’s a massive tournament now. But those teams are insulated against early failure by the system. It’s for this reason I say there’s a little bit of both in terms of how hard it is to win. There are of course more good teams. But there’s far less jeaopardy for those good teams.
If you understood the points you're trying to make you wouldn't still be arguing about the comparative difficulty of winning the two competitions, using things as "evidence" to prove that the European Cup format was harder, that aren't actually evidence of that at all.
"It’s a massive tournament now." - The tournament has contained 32 teams (or around that number) since the 60s. It actually reduced in number to 16-24 in the 90s, until they settled on the format we're all used to now. The only other interpretations of "massive" here are in terms of prestige and global appeal, which is only true precisely because the tournament now contains a higher number of better teams, or in terms of the number of games, which it could be argued actually makes it more difficult to win. The tournament hasn't grown to make room for the 2nd-4th place teams from stronger nations, these teams have simply replaced the champions of incredibly weak nations.
"those teams are insulated against early failure by the system ... Across a two legged tie you could see a match go against expectation. In a 6 game group, you won’t." - As above, the weakest teams in the modern format are stronger than the weakest teams in the old format. Also, an individual teams potentially getting a tough first round (with an equal if not greater chance of having a far easier first round) doesn't mean the competition, as a whole, is harder to win, and we regularly see stronger teams eliminated in the group stage. Manchester United and Sevilla were eliminated this season, Barcelona and Juventus last season. These were all teams considered among the very strongest in the competition.
"It’s as easy as me saying ‘you’ve missed your own point as the dross didn’t qualify because they didn’t win their league’." - This isn't the same thing. The second, third and fourth best teams of the strongest nations have always been better than the best teams of the weakest nations, often far better.
"There are of course more good teams. But there’s far less jeaopardy for those good teams." - This is just completely contradictory. If there are more good teams, there is of course more jeopardy for any team in the tournament, as their chances of facing a good side earlier on are higher, even if that is in a group format.
As I see it, you're either arguing that the "champions-only" rule made it harder, or the unseeded knockout format made it harder. Neither are true.
The argument is blatantly false if you're arguing that the "champions-only" rule meant the quality of team was higher. This year's tournament (assuming Europa League winners still get a spot) would have included Molde (Norway), Rakow Czerochow (Poland), AEK Athens (Greece), Maccabi Haifa (Israel), Aris Limassol (Cyprus), Slovan Bratislava (Slovakia), Dinamo Zagreb (Croatia), Olimpija Ljubljana (Slovenia), Sparta Prague (Czech Republic), Klaksvik (Faroe Islands) and four from Zalgiris (Lithuania), Ludogorets Razgrad (Bulgaria), Qarabag (Azerbaijan), Hacken (Sweden), HJK (Finland), Breidablik (Iceland), Sheriff Tiraspol (Moldova), BATE Borisov (Belarus), Zrinjski Mostar (Bosnia & Herzegovina) and Astana (Kazakhstan) in place of Real Madrid, Manchester United, Inter Milan, Borussia Dortmund, Atletico Madrid, RB Leipzig, Porto, Arsenal, AC Milan, Lazio, Real Sociedad, Newcastle United, Union Berlin, PSV Eindhoven and Braga. Group format or straight knockout, the latter is quite clearly a far tougher set of teams to get through.
To reference another competition as an example, there is a reason that Europe receive so many World Cup spots, rather than it just five or six teams from each continent making up a 32 team tournament. The latter would have seen Algeria, Panama, New Zealand, Solomon Islands, Tahiti, Papua New Guinea and Fiji in the tournament at the expense of Portugal, Poland, Wales and four of France, England, Germany, Spain, Belgium, Croatia, Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland and Serbia (and this was with Italy not qualifying at all).
If you mean just the difference between a group format and the knockout format, using this season's tournament again, and using coefficient to determine the "strongest" teams, two of the best eight were eliminated in the group stage (Manchester United and Sevilla), and one only progressed on head-to-head goal difference (PSG). That's hardly "insulated from failing early". This season saw four of the 16 highest coefficients drop out in the group stage. Last season saw seven of them, with another two from the best eight. The season before was six of them, before that another three, then another four, then another three, etc. Every single season, strong teams fail to make it out of the group stage.
To reference another competition as an example, the FA Cup can be won by a team that's avoided literally all of the big-guns. I posted about the 07/08 version earlier. There were three Championship teams in the semi-final, alongside Portsmouth. Portsmouth won the competition facing just Manchester United from above them in the Premier League, Cardiff made the final having faced just one Premier League side prior to Portsmouth (it was Middlesbrough), and West Brom were eliminated in the semi-final by the first Premier League side they came up against. Our own success in 2015/16 saw us come up against just one team from the Premier League's top half.
Your whole argument for it being more difficult is based either on some insane notion that the best champions from Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Slovenia and Moldova (the 29th, 30th, 31st and 32nd ranked nations) somehow represent more of a challenge than the fourth best teams from England, Spain, Germany and Italy, or the slightly less insane notion that playing six games, against (to use my earlier examples of this year's Champions League), the champions of Germany, Turkey and Denmark (3rd, 12th and 17th ranked nations), the second best teams of England, France and Netherlands (1st, 5th and 6th ranked nations), or even the second best team in Germany, and the fourth best teams from Italy and England (3rd, 4th and 1st ranked nations) is somehow "far less" jeopardising to the chances of progression than a two-legged tie against any of those teams. Both are simply untrue.
