Europe’s authorised governing body UEFA are planning another breakthrough for the sake of the beautiful game. Starting from next season, the Champions League drawing phase will have a computerised system to cut down duration.
The 2024/25 UEFA Champions League involves 36 teams across the continent. Each contestant will play eight games, four home and four away. There will also be four pots containing nine teams based on the UEFA’s five–year coefficient performance, with a club playing two opponents from each pot.
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The UEFA Champions League old draw format will take too long to finish
The old format of drawing involved some notable names in the past, taking and putting the ball from and into a bowl. With the current 36-team format, it requires around 900 balls due to the draw’s complexity.
According to ESPN, UEFA stated that drawing each club manually will take hours to finish. Thus, a computerised system is chosen to fix this issue. Contestants also are not able to draw teams from the same country.
Unless there were too many in a pot, making a same-country draw scenario was unavoidable. But UEFA insists that such a case would rarely happen despite the chance of a country being represented with more than four teams. One association would only be represented maximum by seven teams, which is possible for the Premier League, LaLiga, Serie A, Bundesliga, and Ligue 1.
UEFA Champions League will be fair by computarized draw
UEFA also confirmed that there would be two limited knockout draws, one at the end of the league phase and one at the end of the Round of 16. This would only decide which side of the bracket to be. To guarantee fairness in the process, UEFA partners with Ernst & Young who will audit the robust system.