  One of the most popular club football tournaments, the UEFA Champions League,
will see a fundamental reform from the 2024/25 season: the traditional group
stage will be replaced by one league where each of the 36 teams plays eight
matches. To guarantee that the opponents of the clubs are of the same strength
in the new design, it is crucial to forecast the performance of the teams
before the tournament as well as possible. This paper investigates whether the
currently used rating of the teams, the UEFA club coefficient, can be improved
by taking the games played in the national leagues into account. According to
our logistic regression models, a variant of the Elo method provides a higher
accuracy in terms of explanatory power in the Champions League matches. The
Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) is encouraged to follow the
example of the FIFA World Ranking and reform the calculation of the club
coefficients in order to avoid unbalanced schedules in the novel tournament
format of the Champions League.
