Exactly the thinking behind the ESL. "How dare there be any new teams in the best club competition in Europe?"
I am sorry but it's not the same thinking at all. The Euros with 4 groups of 4 were an open competition to anyone who performed well enough in the qualifiers. The ESL would be a closed shop.
Expanding international competitions has its merits, for sure, but it's not because it goes against the 'thinking' behind the ESL - the two are completely different things.
You do what you need to do to win it. Until we won in Madrid, we hadn't won any competition without penalties since 2003. Did you complain about that?
Portugal scraped into the knockout round last time after a 3-3 rollercoaster. Trying to get through a group with 3 draws is extremely risky, and depends a lot on the results in other groups, something you have no control over.
I said above I do not dispute that Portugal deserved their title. The rules were the same to all, so fair play to them for winning it the way they did, however ugly I might think it was.
What we are discussing is what it does to the level of the competition - when you have third-placed teams qualifying on a group of four, you are rendering near-useless a large part of the competition. The bulk of games in any international competition is in the group stages, yet the big teams need to be truly incompetent not to qualify under the current setup, given how many teams progress in the competition. Hence you have lots of group stage games that are hardly as decisive as they would have been under previous rules. The 4 third-placed teams that qualified in 2016 had a combined total of 3 wins! Very difficult indeed
And that's why I also said that, if you're going to expand, then the very least you could do is change the competition's format.
Portugal are a case in point with how sh*t they were in the group stage, and how it didn't matter in the end. They did go through with a manic 3-3 draw they had to fight for until the very end, so I'm not saying they planned to draw three games, they surely tried to go for the win. The irony is precisely in the fact that they tried and failed to do so 3 times, against hardly impressive competition (Hungary, Iceland and Austria
), but still qualified.
You earn your place in the Euros, as you have to play 8-10 qualifiers over the past 2 years, and playoffs. For the biggest countries qualifying is easy, but for most countries it's always a struggle. It's the hardest international tournament of all to win, and as it has expanded, it's only got more difficult to win, and so England have never won it at all.
I don't know why you keep mentioning England, I don't care about them at all.
It's not true it's become more difficult to win though. You have nearly given the big teams a free pass to the knockout rounds by making the group stages poorer in quality (as they now draw from a bigger pool of lower-ranked teams) and easier to qualify (by allowing 4 out of 6 third-placed teams to pass) - which means they only really need to perform in the later stages of the competition.
I just don't see much sense in saying that adding sh*t teams to a competition somehow makes it more difficult to win.