Thankfully, Nicky Hayen has a natural gift for mime. The circumstances in which Hayen, the Club Brugge manager, found himself trying to communicate with his squad were not ideal. The stands of Jan Breydel Stadium were still packed. The noise was so loud that it seemed as if the whole place, a concrete hulk held together by convention and hope, might crumble.

A few minutes after the final whistle of his team’s victory against Sporting CP, he gathered his players in a tight circle for a postgame debrief. They glowed with sweat and victory, their arms draped over one another’s shoulders. Even at close quarters, most instinctively leaned forward, straining to hear their manager over the din.

His gestures, though, were emphatic enough to make his message abundantly clear. At various moments, he pointed at the players themselves, at the jubilant fans, at the glistening turf: This is who you are, this is what you have done, this is where you belong. He clenched his fists and raised his arms in triumph, the signal to his players that they might start to bounce, dance, and spray water bottles in lieu of Champagne.

Hayen, in other words, did not seem to believe that this game, this win, lacked meaning.

The same was true of Brugge’s players and its euphoric fans.

In the year or so since its inception and the three months since its debut, the sprawling new format of the Champions League — with its endless stream of games and its blurred lines and its extendable, flyleaf table — has turned what was once football’s most revered club competition into an pale, ersatz version of itself.

The tournament, the theory goes, is now bloated almost beyond repair, its drama diluted and its jeopardy confected. Each game is inherently disposable, taking place in a vacuum of meaning, unmoored from the competition as a whole, a sort of landfill soccer, staged for the sake of being staged, every single one of them a waymarker on soccer’s journey from sport to cynical, money-spinning content-delivery pipeline.

All of that may be true, of course. As the Jan Breydel Stadium throng sang the praises of Hayen and his players, it looked as if nobody had bothered to tell Club Brugge.

That the new format of the Champions League has its roots in the bottomless greed — and self-serving cowardice of the cartel of Premier League powerhouses and Continental aristocrats who have long confused their self-interest with that of the game as a whole — is not really in question.

The “Swiss model,” as it was labeled, was first endorsed by UEFA as a way to mollify the game’s permanently restless grandees, to ensure that they felt that the Champions League was working for them. It is only somewhat ironic, then, that much of the work on its design happened at almost exactly the same time as a dozen of those clubs were also busy working on their short-lived, ill-fated breakaway European Super League.

The two projects were not all that different. Europe’s elite wanted to make more money. That meant playing more games and, crucially, more games among themselves.

In the aftermath of the Super League’s collapse, one executive at a mutineer club — who asked to remain anonymous to protect his relationships — acknowledged being confused by what he perceived as a disconnect between what fans said they wanted and what the data seemed to suggest they actually want.

The showpiece encounters between the game’s great houses that ordinarily make up the latter stages of the Champions League are incredibly popular. What was nefarious about wanting to play them more frequently?

This format was supposed to meet that demand. But at the same time, as it grew numerically, it was designed to shrink geographically. Initially, some clubs proposed the introduction of legacy places, spots reserved for previous winners regardless of whether they actually qualified. UEFA and European Leagues, the umbrella body that represents all of Europe’s domestic championships, pushed back on that successfully. It was, one executive involved in those discussions said, little more than a way of protecting the major Italian teams, in particular, from their own shortcomings.

The compromise came in the form of two “coefficient places,” spots reserved for teams from those leagues that performed best across Europe’s three competitions in the previous season: a more palatable option, but nevertheless an obvious sop to the same vested interests. The Champions League group stage now contains 36 teams. The major five leagues provide 22 of them. The result has been a competition that has at times felt unwieldy, inelegant and exhausting.

There has been no one universal experience of this iteration of the Champions League. It is not possible to assert that some, all or none of the games have a prescribed level of meaning. How much a game matters to a club is entirely bespoke.

All of this was unforeseen. The game’s megaliths did not redesign the Champions League to empower the minnows. But an unintended consequence is a consequence nonetheless.