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There was a rare wistfulness around the Champions League draw in Monaco, where football’s most powerful and wealthy gathered in a fittingly ostentatious setting. An era was about to pass. If the competition’s group stage has recently become a round to pay minimal attention to, this is a season to really savour it. That is because it’s the last one before the introduction of the Swiss system. This will be the last campaign we go through the satisfying symmetry of the round-robin, hoping it builds up to one of those final matchdays – part of a lexicon that is the stage’s legacy – where it is anything but symmetrical and chaos reigns. The clean nature of the format has produced some wonderfully untidy endings. Appropriately, a returning Arsenal will aim to relive how often they got through under Arsene Wenger. Newcastle United will doubtless be seeking to build atmosphere by showing Faustino Asprilla’s hat-trick against Barcelona in 1997-98, as well as the stirring comeback in 2002-03. Manchester United, the English club perhaps most associated with how thrillingly exacting the group stage used to be, are back for one final fight. It might not be easy, but that may not prove such an obstacle to getting through. This is, of course, a large reason why this is the last group stage. All it has really got left is nostalgia. There have been fewer and fewer nights where you feel the old tension. On average, 15 of the 16 wealthiest usually get through every season. It was arguably why Manchester City’s long-awaited victory was the real start of a new era, more so than this end to the traditional groups, or the fact this is the first campaign since 2002-03 without Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo. The defending champions are the first state-owned club to win the competition, capping how the entry of such interests and an escalation of a very Western form of capitalism have had such a transformative effect on European football. This is why the group stage was changed. The constant raising of the financial threshold has made so much of it so predictable. Altering the format is, of course, addressing the wrong issue. The problem isn’t the structure but structural financial inequality. Through that, City’s win coincided with how the Champions League was already losing some of its lustre. That sense of suspense is gone. Its world feels smaller, with fewer and fewer clubs able to realistically think they can win the trophy. Can anyone really think that at all this season outside City? Has there ever been any time when one team were such overwhelming favourites, without anyone close to a comparable heavyweight? Barcelona 2009-10 or 2010-11, perhaps, but even that was in a less financially-stratified football world. That economic structure is one factor explaining City’s power. Consider Barcelona’s own group stage from 2009-10, and how testing it was. They lost at home to Rubin Kazan, and came close to going out. The other side is just how good Guardiola has made this City, and how they brutalised both Bayern Munich and Real Madrid last season. Wenger’s description of AC Milan as “super favourites” to his Monaco staff in the 1990s doesn’t feel like it adequately describes the current champions. Even in regards to potential flaws in the City side, last season’s victory has already removed virtually all of the self-doubts that made their European ties more enthralling. One of the dominant recent storylines has ended, Pep Guardiola is instead seeking to fortify the argument that he is the greatest of all time by retaining the trophy for the first time in his career and matching Carlo Ancelotti with his fourth as a manager. It’s hard to imagine anyone in the modern game wanted the Champions League as much as Guardiola over the last decade, but that sense of yearning is now most felt around Harry Kane and Kylian Mbappe. Sprinting into the breach left by Messi and Ronaldo, Mbappe knows the trophy is crucial to his own legacy. He is said to be more aware of this than any previous player, even those two totems. It’s partly why he wants to go to Real Madrid, although his own last season at Paris Saint-Germain may well coincide with the club finally putting in place a team that has a football logic. That, in turn, means that the soap opera element of this sportswashing project could have gone, maybe making PSG less interesting. Under Luis Enrique, though, a hard-running young team look more capable of going the distance. That prospect is why Kane has gone to Bayern Munich, and the fact that the final is being staged at Wembley only adds to one of this campaign’s more enthralling individual narratives. Jude Bellingham will be looking at it the same way with Real Madrid. Beyond that, though, it doesn’t feel like there are many other foreign clubs that can really challenge the Premier League’s power. This is how the world of the Champions League has got smaller, with the solution to bloat the opening stage next season. There is still a sense that Xavi’s Barcelona are that level below. Atletico Madrid are resurgent but not the resilient force of almost a decade ago. Milan are, again, promising, but the problem is that they are in the most difficult group of all, along with PSG, Borussia Dortmund and Newcastle United. It’s a particularly challenging group stage for Eddie Howe. He’s not just going to have to adapt to European football – although the modern game makes that far less drastic an adaptation than previous – but also the schedule European football involves. That will be sapping, even as the very theme ringing around St James Park will be invigorating. It is likely to be the main source of suspense. This European outing will also be fraught with emotional investment since there are many in football – and not just in England – willing Newcastle United to fail due to their owners. There remains a general disgruntlement about the summer, and how much the Saudi Pro League disrupted the game while still spending most of its money in the Premier League. It has had the most disruptive effect on the European game since the expansion of the Champions League itself. The distortion that the competition’s own prize money has caused can’t be overlooked. It is central to its power. That power is also why there is a widespread belief around the European game that the Saudi Pro League eventually want into the competition itself. Uefa are currently adamant it will not happen. The prospect does hang there, though. It could be described as a point of no return, but there’s not exactly much prospect of going back to what football was. This season marks a bit of a time capsule in that sense since it is also the last of 32 teams. Next year’s move to 36 might also be the last of the “top four” in the Premier League, as the competition’s coefficient strength could perpetually bring five qualifiers. There is a tremendous amount of symbolism in how Napoli and Real Madrid meet in this last group stage. It was that very fixture, in 1987, that provoked Silvio Berlusconi into pushing for change to the old European Cup in the first place. It was that which led to the group stage, and a round that was for so long the “television spectacular” the Italian magnate wanted. There are similar historical echoes in some other fixtures: United-Galatasaray, Arsenal-Lens, Barcelona-Shakhtar Donetsk. None of them sound like what they used to be, though. There isn’t the same sporting peril. There are some potentially interesting stories, like Union Berlin or Real Sociedad, but most of the groups are fairly predictable. Those involving Arsenal, City and United actually look the worst for that. The usual statement at this point would be that the competition always has the capacity to surprise, but that is, at this point, a hope, rather than an expectation. There’s no longer much to be wistful about, other than what European football used to be. That is an issue that goes beyond the format of the group stage. For now, it means most have to wait beyond even the last-16 for true drama. Read More Manchester United are a mess — and it could be about to get even worse From ‘unpromotable’ to the Champions League: Union Berlin fairytale is perfect antidote to modern football Ramsdale or Raya? Mikel Arteta’s unorthodox solution to Arsenal’s problem Delayed arrival in Milan ‘no big deal’, insists Newcastle boss Eddie Howe UEFA Champions League 2023/24 schedule - every game in the group stage Chelsea boss Mauricio Pochettino understands Thiago Silva’s frustration

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Earlier this year, Apple launched Apple Music Classical as a standalone music app that comes included in the price of Apple Music. It was an unusual move for a streaming platform perhaps more associated with Drake and Taylor Swift. And building it was a major undertaking, given the vast complexity of classical music libraries and the difficulties in navigating them. Apple Music Classical continues to grow. In its latest move, Apple announced a new partnership between Apple and the London Philharmonic Orchestra with the release of a live recording of Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust coming on 3 November. This is just one of the partners Apple Music Classical has. From day one, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra was a partner. The content from that orchestra is extensive, with recordings dating back to 1929. Some of it is unique to Apple and this exclusive content alone has already been streamed millions of times. Recently, senior staffers at the app talked exclusively to The Independent. Apple Music Classical came about because Apple realised that classical artists and fans were really not being served well by streaming. As part of its mission to use its engineering knowhow to fix this, it bought Primephonic, widely recognised as the classical streaming platform that succeeded where others had failed. It took more than a year of work before Apple was happy with what it had created and its release to a highly positive response. Now, classical music lovers don’t have to clamber past Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift to get to Bach and Rachmaninoff. Classical music provides challenges other kinds of music don’t, or at least not to the same extent. Instead of playing an album, artist or track, classical lovers have favourite composers, orchestras, soloists and so on. The search parameters are mind-boggling. Apple is well-equipped, with more classical music than anywhere else on the planet, and Primephonic’s brilliant data metrics were a starting point from which Apple’s engineers and expertise transformed the experience. Want to listen to Vivaldi’s Spring from the Four Seasons? Apple has 1,243 versions for you to choose from. If that sounds overwhelming, Apple has a solution: careful navigation with sophisticated search. Just as Apple Fitness+ has a mantra that everybody is welcome, no matter their fitness level or knowledge, Apple Music Classical is designed for seasoned devotees and newcomers alike. “If you didn’t know much about the world of classical, Apple Music Classical offers a structure so you can get into it. It’s centuries of music, right, so where do you start? It gives you an opportunity to get some perspective on it, explains Mariana Pimenta, who works in operations at Apple Music Classical, saying: “We don’t expect everybody who downloads it to be a professional musician, and we want everyone to experience classical music. Our goal is to bring as many people as possible to this service.” Marina Boiko is an editor. She goes on, “The story of classical is a great place to start and we’ve made sure there’s enough beginner-friendly content, such as playlists of periods or genres.” Not all traditional classical listeners will be especially tech-savvy, but that may not be a problem, as Guy Jones, global head of classical editorial, explains. “Lots of classical fans are new not just to technology but to streaming. The whole point of this product is to bring classical to streaming. It’s the musical genre that wasn’t really being streamed because the experience was previously so bad. The technical side of things may be less of a problem, especially as Apple’s guidelines around human interface design are baked into our product, but the challenge is more in explaining that streaming opens up opportunity and accessibility. “When I was first getting into classical music, I had to buy CDs. I had to choose carefully what CD I wanted to buy each month. The ability now to just pick a random composer and ask, ‘Do I like this composer?’ That ability to let you dip your toe in the water, I think that’s the real power of something like Apple Music Classical, and not just for beginners, for the experts too.” The absence of the Primephonic app while Apple Music Classical was being developed was down to getting it right, Carlos Anez Gomez, from the metadata team, says. “It took us time, but it paid off because we needed to take care with every single point and I think we managed to do it, both in human terms and the algorithms: we made a great balance between computer work and human work. Where Primephonic had a relatively small catalogue, Apple Music Classical has a huge number of albums, for example.” Boiko adds, “No one knows everything that has ever been recorded in the history of classical music. And in that sense, we put a lot of emphasis on the discovery element, especially when it comes to the underrepresented composers.” Each work has its own place, called the work page in Apple Music Classical, where you can find all the recordings, so it’s easy to compare different versions. Primephonic’s unique data continues to be essential. “The structured metadata, that’s the uniqueness of it,” Boiko says. “It makes it easy to find things even if you don’t know what you want. That structure, it’s what classical music apps needed and didn’t have. There are many ways not to get lost because you can search by ensemble, by orchestra or even by instrument.” The work page is important, then. As Gomez says, “People discovering music can check this work page and say, ‘Aha, there is a new piece by a certain composer and I have a work page which will give me all the information that I need.’ I discover music every day going through this.” Another key element is the playlist. Boiko goes on, “Playlists are structured in different ways. So, genre playlists are the best way for you to start listening to classical music. The story of classical is a narrated cycle, that guides you through all the centuries of music. “Then there are more specific playlists. You can listen to duets and trios and quartets or quintets and then it gives you an overview of all this chamber music and maybe something that you wouldn’t necessarily find on other platforms.” Jones explains the importance of the human touch. “I don’t think it’s widely known that at Apple it’s human curators behind the playlists. The assumption is that it’s all algorithms now. But for classical that’s a particularly important point, because it’s such a huge genre. People talk about classical like it’s one block and it’s really a thousand years of music from pretty much every country in the world. Our job is breaking classical into smaller chunks, to give people the agency to discover what they like, and to go down their own rabbit holes and feel more confident exploring.” How does Apple Music Classical find a way to appeal to everyone? Jones explains, “It’s a really hard thing to do, to cover that broad spectrum. It’s a constant tightrope walk because you have very knowledgeable people with clear ideas about what they think the genre is as well as trying to please newcomers. We strike that balance in terms of our editorial strategy by being as authentic and genuine as possible and conveying our passion for classical. For those hardcore classical nerds a big part of the product is the browse and the search as much as it is the editorial, I think for the newcomers, they use the editorial a lot more if they don’t know what to search for.” As it grows, there’s a lot more for Apple to do, and the team are working on changes and improvements. Here’s a last word from each of them about why the app matters. Gomez says, “People will discover that along with any classical library that they can have their access quickly to any recording they have.” As Boiko says, “It’s a lot of music. I think there’s not one person that wouldn’t find something they would love here.” Boiko has a different take on the importance of Apple Music Classical: “Maybe the listeners will have emotional responses to it. And at the end of the day music is there to make our lives better. It definitely enriches our lives.” Finally, Jones comments, “The thing about human curation is we are ultimately making a human decision. And so, for instance, if you choose a recommended recording for Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, you’re instantly upsetting everyone who has a strong opinion about their favourite. 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