  The UEFA Champions League is the major European club football competition,
however, most national champions have to play qualification matches to receive
a slot in the group stage of the tournament. The paper evaluates the impact of
the only reform in the Champions Path of the qualifying system since 2009,
effective from the 2018/19 season. While it is anticipated that the reduction
in the number of berths decreases the probability of advancing to the group
stage, the distribution of the effects among the national associations is
revealed here via Monte-Carlo simulations. In contrast to previous studies, our
methodology considers five seasons instead of only one to filter out any
possible season-specific attributes. Almost all countries are found to gain
less prize money on average. Several champions, including the Bulgarian, the
Scottish, and, especially, the Swiss, might lose million Euros. As the
consequences depend to a large extent on the arbitrary cutoffs in the access
list, we propose to introduce some randomness into the determination of entry
stages in the qualification.
