Celtic and Rangers set for Champions League draw overhaul after UEFA admission

Next season, the competition will be drastically altered, and plans are underway to simplify draw.

Due to UEFA’s discovery that organising the draw manually under the competition’s new format would require “three or four hours,” the Champions League draw is scheduled for revision this summer.

For the upcoming season, the three men’s club competitions run by the European Football Association will have new designs. The 32-team Champions League group phase, which has been in place since the 1999–2000 season, will give way to a 36-team league phase. In the league phase, each team will play eight different opponents as UEFA attempts to devise a format that minimises dead rubbers, matches up elite teams early in the competition, and gives league finishing position more weight in the knockout draw.

Rangers, who lead their Old Firm opponents by two points with nine games remaining, and Celtic, who are fighting for the Premiership title, will be interested in the draw structure. The league winners go straight to the group stages, while the runners-up go through to the third qualifying round of Europe’s Blue Riband competition.

Teams are currently chosen by hand from seeded pots, but UEFA’s deputy general secretary Giorgio Marchetti acknowledged that this could not continue. He estimated that the Champions League draw alone could take up to four hours and involve roughly 900 balls if it carried on in the same manner.

The specifics of the draw’s methodology are still being finalised, but according to UEFA, it will be a “hybrid” event with both automation and human ball drawing. To allay any claims that the draw was manipulated, UEFA declared that any automatic components will still be subject to independent audits. Except in extremely rare situations, teams from the same nation will not be allowed to play together until the new knockout round, which will be contested by the teams who finished ninth through twenty-four in the league phase.

From the last 16 onward, UEFA will implement a tennis-style seeding system, meaning that the teams that place first and second in the league phase will be drawn into different halves and will not be able to play each other until the final.

Two European Performance Spots (EPS) are set aside in the league phase for teams from the nations that combined for the greatest results in the previous season’s European campaign. Since Italy and Germany presently hold both positions, the fifth-place teams in each of those leagues—RB Leipzig and Roma, respectively—would receive the EPS. Since England is currently one spot behind Germany in the Premier League standings, Manchester United may find themselves in the unique position of needing to hope that their fierce rivals Manchester City and Liverpool win the Champions League and Europa League, respectively, in order to potentially open up a fifth Champions League qualifying spot.

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