UEFA adopts automatic draw for Champions League and European club competitions

UEFA will automate the draw process for the group stage of the Champions League, Europa League and Conference League, scheduled for August 29 and 30 in Monaco, instead of the usual manual draw, it has announced.

Each of the three competitions will feature 36 teams in a single “league”, with the aim of securing the top eight places in the standings to qualify directly for the round of 16. The remaining eight tickets to the same round will be booked through play-off matches.

The 36 teams are divided into four levels. Each team plays eight matches against eight different teams: it faces two different teams from each level, with one match at home and one away.

Only the Conference League competition will be different, as each team will face six teams from the six existing levels, with three matches at home and three away.

The complexity of a draw of this type, as well as its duration if it is conducted entirely manually as in previous years when teams were divided into four groups, prompted UEFA to use the services of two companies to automate the process.

Next, AE Live, a sports data company that has been running automated draws for many years in many disciplines, will provide a live draw program to determine the eight competitors for each team selected after manually drawing their ball from a bowl placed on the stage.

All 36 teams, from those in Pot 1 to Pot 4 (or Pot 6 in the Europa Conference League), will see their balls drawn randomly from the pot, before the identities of their opponents are revealed in real time.

The computer must respect two criteria: no team can face an opponent from the same league (same country), nor can it face more than two teams from the same country. For example, Paris Saint-Germain cannot face Monaco, nor can it face three teams from the English Premier League.

The computer decisions will be verified instantly by two independent systems. Everything will be verified and supervised by the auditing firm EY.

The group stage matches schedule for each competition will be available on Saturday, August 31.

(AFP)