Hate the new Champions League format? Then welcome the change and be open-minded | Champions League

A a few weeks ago I was sitting eating the neighbor's cat (it's OK, I'm an immigrant) when I saw something even more disgusting – the UEFA Champions League X-Video (Twitter) titled “The dawn of a new era.” This 30-second clip was an attempt to gently introduce the format of the European Cup, which begins next week.

They have hired a good group of ex-pros: Luís Figo, Gianluigi Buffon, Robbie Keane (who has probably been supporting the new 36-team league system since he was a child) stand there looking confused. The highlight is Zlatan Ibrahimovic, ready to conduct an orchestra. “Who wrote that?” he asks. In walks UEFA President Aleksander Ceferin, wearing impossibly shiny shoes. “Me,” he says, arms outstretched, before folding them and smiling.

Why is he featured so prominently in this advert? It's true that some – not all – younger fans prefer the player to the team, but is there a part of the internet that I haven't discovered yet where people just want to see football's greatest officials in shiny, tapered suits? Who did it suit best? Gianni or Aleksander?

It is healthy to be sceptical of those who run football: their track record over the years is not exactly impressive. And now Ceferin wants to write and sing the theme song. Maybe he will decide to stay for another cycle (or two).

As a human being I'm open-minded, but as a football fan I obviously hate change, so I wasn't disappointed when this terrible advert showed me that the whole format was a disaster before the first ball was even kicked.

And there are reasons for concern. More games in an already overloaded schedule – player welfare, football's rising carbon footprint. A concession to the big clubs in an attempt to stave off the European Super League. No guarantee of the promised reduction in meaningless games. A league where you don't play everyone else. A league table with 36 teams – whose screen is big enough for that?

I became something of a Champions League group stage ultra, even though I've been indifferent to the subject at best for the past 20 years. Like all football, it was sometimes good, sometimes boring.

I had closed myself off. Thankfully, Mark Langdon of the Racing Post, who writes for the Guardian Football Weekly, was on hand to open my mind again.

It's more interesting to play eight teams instead of three. The away trips are more fun for the fans. The teams play two opponents from the same pool, which means more “big” games, but also more games that the smaller teams can win. Many favored teams may only make it to the playoff round, which could make it quite exciting.

Before this compelling intervention, my reaction was the perfect example of the generational conflict that all fans experience. We see every new development as a contradiction to the game we fell in love with at age 10 – and are proud to tell younger people that those were the best years, simpler times. But at the same time, we roll our eyes at the people before us who claim that football was better before we fell in love with it.

Of course, that's an oversimplification, but fans who want to wallow in nostalgia but completely reject anything new may find themselves stuck in an uncomfortable no-man's land between dinosaurs and hipsters. It's a musical waiting to be played, with Richard Keys and Andy Gray stomping around the stage laughing at xG while Opta Joe tries to fend them off with an iPad, some analysis and some very long Athletic articles.

From a broadcaster's perspective, a healthy scepticism about new things is a good thing. You have to be true to yourself, but also remember that you have a vested interest in being busy for the next 30 years or so. It's important to move with the times. XG took me a while – it's clearly not perfect, but it can be useful.

In a very dry moment, looking ahead to this weekend's games, I was struck by a statistic from Jérémy Doku about “ball runs” – a term that doesn't come easily to my lips. On the BBC Sport website, I learned that the Belgian winger “has carried the ball 747.8 metres in the Premier League this season, almost 300m more than any other player”. Brighton's Jan Paul van Hecke is in second place with 457.3m.

Is that interesting? Probably. He runs with the ball a lot more than anyone else. What does that mean? He's a good dribbler. He does that more easily when he plays for Manchester City. Perhaps it's interesting to note that Pep Guardiola has given him permission to do that a lot more than any of his teammates. And yet you get the feeling that in football, you don't need anyone to count how many meters Van Hecke moves the ball forward per game.

This isn't a conclusion that will go viral, but the reality is that different people want different things from the game. Admire Van Hecke's ball-handling or don't. Either is fine. And it's perfectly acceptable to look at your vintage dice through rose-tinted glasses.

Interestingly, when it comes to the Champions League, there is a small group of us born in the late 70s/early 80s whose formative years of learning the game coincided with the exclusion of English clubs from Europe. The European Cup didn't even exist. They didn't see it, Saint and Greavesie didn't talk about it. It didn't exist. If anyone has an open mind about next week, it's us. It's time to change my mind, even if I want the players to steal the show from the suits when the games start, controversial as that may be.