Follow me carefully.....
Until now 16 teams qualified directly to CL groups while other 16 teams were doing it through qualifications. Depending on the UEFA Country coefficient the teams that qualified directly came from:
The top placed 6 countries gave 2 teams each directly in CL (that's 12 teams)
Countries placed from 7-10 gave 1 team directly in CL (that's 4 more teams).
The other 16 teams came through qualification and in 99% of the cases these 16 teams were the 3rd and 4th placed teams from Spain, Italy, England, France, Germany or the champions and 2nd placed teams from Portugal, Holland, Turkey etc.
Sometimes not even one single team from the smaller leagues qualified for CL, and in rare cases (like this year), teams from Belarus or Cyprus played in CL.
Now Platini made sure that at least 5 teams from the minor leagues will play in CL.
This is how:
1. Next year 22 teams will play directly in CL. The best three teams from the best three leagues (in this case ENG, ESP and ITA) , the best 2 teams from the leagues ranked 4-6 (in this case GER, FRA and RUS) and the champions of Romania, Scotland, Turkey, Portugal, Holland, Ukraine and Belgium.
The other 10 teams that will play in CL will be given from two different qualifying groups.
In the first "group" called the "Best-Placed Path", the 4th placed teams from Spain, England, Italy, the third placed teams from Germany, France, Russia and the runner-up's from the other strong European leagues will play and in two qualification rounds 5 teams will be left. These 5 teams will go directly in CL.
In the second "group", called Champions' Path, only the teams from the smaller leagues will play, and after 4 qualification rounds there will be 5 winners and these 5 winners will go directly in CL.
In this so called Champions' Path, you won't have teams from the strongest 13 leagues in Europe and only leagues placed in 14 to 52 in UEFA rankings will participate. (in other words, teams from Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Austria, Poland, Slovenia, Cyprus, Estonia, Albania, Sweden, Ireland, Macedonia etc).
So, in any case, there will be 5 teams from the European smaller leagues playing in CL next year.
Get it ?