Abstract and absurd, Uefa's Nations League is anything but the Ctrl-Alt-Delete the international game needs

Scene. We fade up on the mathematics department of a prestigious Ivy League college - maybe Stanford, maybe MIT, it doesn’t matter so much - where, holed up in a dimly-lit fourth-floor office, a middle-aged professor is having a long dark night of the soul.

Blackboards to the left of him, blackboards to the right of him, blackboards behind him, every inch of them covered in indecipherable formulae and dense scrawl. At his feet, a wastepaper basket, full to overflowing with screwed-up balls of paper. Close up on the professor. A bead of sweat is forming on his brow. It’s almost dawn. He hasn’t slept a wink. The clock seems to be ticking double time. Perhaps he’s going insane. Perhaps nobody, he reflects with an aching heart, will ever understand the format of the Uefa Nations League.

Of course, it’s not quite as abstruse as all that; in the film, as it happens, it turns out Matt Damon knew everything all along, but never came forward. But this week’s unveiling by Uefa of the new Nations League format was a portentous reminder of the Escherian stairwell that awaits us from the start of next season. If you found the innumerable, impenetrable second-place permutations of World Cup qualifying tough going, then brace yourself. Years from now, you will come to regard it as a golden age.

The big idea, essentially, is that Europe’s 55 nations will be split into four divisions, based on their ranking. The top division, featuring England and a load of other teams better than them, will itself be split into four groups of three. The group winners go through to the semi-finals, the bottom teams get relegated to the division below. So far, so tedious.

It is at this point that things start slipping into the Twilight Zone. Because at this point the groups are all mixed up again for the purposes of Euro 2020 qualifying. Ten new groups are formed, with the top two in each qualifying for the finals, and one additional place reserved for each of the four leagues from earlier. The four group winners from each of the four groups compete in a four-team play-off for the remaining place, unless they already qualified in the second phase, in which case their place is taken by… no, please, step away from the sharp thing. Put the sharp thing down. I beg you.

So that takes care of the “what”. The more pertinent question, I suppose, is the “why”. Over time, you can imagine the format becoming second nature, however extrinsically hard it may be to explain. But quite apart from whether anyone without a postgraduate qualification can understand it, the Nations League is, quite simply, a ridiculously unfair competition in which injustice is virtually enshrined.

Let’s go back, first of all, to those three-team groups. The big problem with three-team groups is that three - and again, apologies, for the maths sermon - is an odd number. And so, one team will finish its games before the others. As they discovered at the 1982 World Cup, when Germany and Austria played out a contrived 1-0 win that saw both teams progress, this is the ideal scenario for fixing, collusion or some other form of connivance. Fifa shelved three-team groups in 1986, although it is considering bringing them back, which goes to show that there is no idea so bad that Fifa won’t consider it.

Let’s move on to those Euro 2020 play-offs, which give each of the four divisions - yes, even the minnows in League D - one final shot at qualification. And so a country - let’s call them England, for the sake of argument - could conceivably lose all four of their Nations League games, all 10 of their subsequent qualification games, and still somehow qualify. Meanwhile, if all 12 teams in a division have already qualified, the play-off spots go to teams from the division below. You could, therefore, have a scenario where the League A play-offs are being contested by four teams from League B. International football, as devised by Samuel Beckett.

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Look, everyone understands that the international game needs a little bit of a Ctrl-Alt-Delete. Interest is low, the club game is beginning to cast an ever broader shadow, and in a sport as conservative as football, fresh ideas are always liable to get shot down on first sight. But what seems so arresting about Uefa’s plan is the way they seem to have gone about it. The abstract and the absurd, the golden tickets and the second-chance saloons, the convoluted and the plain crooked: this is not so much a sporting competition as a wacky adventure, an attempt to wheeze some life into a moribund product by adopting the confected jeopardy of a television game show. And by the way, nobody watches those any more either.