Just watched the draw for the new Champions League season. It's a bit of a mess and I'm not sure what to think of it.
What's new?
- 4 new teams are new. In total there are now 36 teams competing.
- No classic group stage anymore. Every team will have 8 matches but only face them once.
How did the draw go?
- The 36 teams were split up into 4 pots. So each pot had 9 teams.
The 4 pots:
CC = club coefficent. The clubs were split up after their CC. As you can see pot 1 has the 9 teams with the highest CC, pot 4 has the 9 teams with the lowest CC.
Every team faces two teams from each pot, one team at home and one team away. They cannot face more than two teams from one country. They cannot face more than two teams from the same country.
Gianluigi Buffon had the honour to pick the teams and Ronaldo had the very difficult task of pushing a button every single time Buffon drew a team bc they didn't draw each team to each other bc obviously this would have taken way too long. Instead they had a computer program which actually handled the draw. To start the KI draw Ronaldo pushed a button.
So as example, Buffon drew the first team from pot 1, let's say Real Madrid again, and then Ronaldo pushed a button to start the KI. The KI then drew the 8 opponents from the 4 pots. Then Buffon drew the next team from pot 1, Ronaldo pushed the button again, the KI did it's work again. And so on and on. So basically they drew every single team at least once. When they had reached the last pot (4) and where down to the last 4-5 teams everything was basically already set.
Here are the results:
Pot 1 teams
Pot 2 teams
Pot 3 teams
Pot 4
So Real Madrid from pot 1 is going to face:
Home: Dortmund (1), AC Milan (2), RB Salzburg (3), Stuttgart (4)
Away: Liverpool (1), Atalanta (2), Lille (3), Brest (4)
But we don't know in which order Real is going to face the teams yet. This will be up to the KI which is going to calculate the exact schedule for each team. Theoretically it could happen that Real will have their first 4 matches away and then their 4 matches at home. Or it's away-home-away-home-etc. Or away-home-home-away-home-home-away-away. Or any other possible mix. The definitive schedule will be announced on Saturday.
On the last matchday all 18 matches are going to be played at the same time. Like the last matches of a group at the World/Euro cup or last CL season.
The commentator mentioned an interesting detail. UEFA was running hundres and thousands of test draws with fake results. In the end it occured that 7.62 points (=8 points) will be enough to advance to the next round, the kick-off tournament. Basically two wins and two draws can be enough to advance.
With 36 teams and no groups they are going to form one table, like in any national league.
The first 8 teams are set up for the round of 16.
The teams ranked from 9th to 24th will play a two legged qualification round to set up the other 8 teams for the round of 16.
Teams ranked from 25th to 36th are gone from the competition and won't get a spot in the Europa league.