The 55-nation, four-league tournament has a format to make the brain ache but Europe’s governing body maintains it will be an improvement on the drudge of friendlies

Type Uefa Nations League into an internet search engine and you will be greeted by a plethora of bewildered voices. From Harry Maguire who admitted the England team were baffled, to Gareth Southgate who struggled to wrap his head around the complicated format; not to mention the fans, many of whom had little knowledge of it happening until this week.

So what is it and should we even care? When Uefa announced the tournament’s structure in October 2017 it was met with confusion. The format is enough to make the brain ache but the basic premise is that the 55 European nations are divided into four leagues, determined by each country’s Uefa ranking last November.

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The governing body insists it will shake up the international football landscape outside major tournaments, helping eliminate that miserable drudge of meaningless friendlies between World Cups and European Championships. The Football Association anticipates it will lead to England having a consistent run of games against high-level opponents – a good thing for a young and relatively inexperienced group of players.

Southgate’s team are in League A alongside 11 other leading sides, including Belgium, Germany and France. These are then split into four mini-leagues of three teams. In England’s case that will mean matches against Spain and Croatia home and away in the first batch of games between September and November. The four pool winners of League A advance to a mini‑tournament to decide the overall champion next summer. Some are mischievously saying it could be England’s best chance to win a trophy since 1966.

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So far, so confusing. As with any new venture there is likely to be a teething period where no one is quite sure what is going on but optimists would point out that we are starting from a relatively low point as the popularity of international football has been on the wane for years.

The idea of a Nations League was first floated in 2013 in a Uefa executive committee meeting and was the brainchild of the Uefa president, Michel Platini, who has since been banned from the game. It was one of several options mentioned as part of a discussion about how to improve the attractiveness of international football, which has struggled to maintain its allure amid the continued rise of the club game. Platini also hoped it would help to drive up the TV rights income. “The friendlies don’t really interest anybody – neither the fans nor the players nor the media and nor the national associations,” he said in 2014. “This is a good decision because nobody wants these friendlies.”

For England, the match against Spain on Saturday night at Wembley will be their first game since the Russia World Cup, where the team enjoyed an unexpected and rousing run to the semi-finals before losing to Croatia. The stock of the national side is the highest for two decades and it might be viewed as a missed opportunity that their homecoming match is not on terrestrial TV.

The match will be shown live on Sky Sports, with highlights on ITV, but it will be the first time live coverage of an entire senior international tournament is denied to terrestrial viewers. ITV and Sky have paid a combined £200m for the rights to England matches between 2018 and 2022, with ITV still showing European Championship and World Cup qualifiers. But for a new group of fans, enticed by the team’s exploits in Russia, it will be disappointing their homecoming fixture is not on free-to-air TV.

The Nations League will feature promotion and relegation between the groups and the additional carrot is the possibility of qualification for Euro 2020. The traditional qualifiers, held from March to November 2019, will decide 20 of the 24 finalists but the remaining spots will be decided by play-offs between the top ranked teams from the Nations League groups who have not already qualified.

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The Uefa’s president, Aleksander Cerefin, believes it will further improve the competitiveness of European sides. The continent has already produced 12 of the 16 semi-finalists at the past four World Cups.

“The relationship between club and national-team football needed rebalancing,” Ceferin said. “That was the thinking behind the Uefa Nations League. In every even year there are World Cups or European Championships. Now in every odd year there will be a Uefa Nations League champion. Football is about competition and now, just like in club football, there will be a national team champion at the close of every season.”

Fifpro, the world players’ union, warned that a new competition would add to the strain on players, making it more difficult to rest senior professionals and give a chance to blood youngsters. But the challenge for the Nations League in the first instance will be winning round those sceptical voices.