UEFA has explained in detail the automation of the first round draw Champions League, Europa League And Conference Leaguewhich will take place on August 29 and 30 Monk. Automation accompanies the new format of these competitions.
In each of them, 36 teams will participate in the new championship phase (formerly group stage), each playing eight matches against eight different opponents, with the aim of finishing in the top eight places in the table, qualifying directly for the round of 16. The other eight teams will come out of the play-offs. The Conference League is different, with six matches against six teams, three away and three at home.
The complexity of such a draw, as well as its duration if it had been carried out entirely by hand as in previous years – when the teams were divided into groups of four – convinced UEFA to use the services of two companies to automate the process. Thus, the company AE Live, a specialist in sports data and accustomed for several years to automated draws in various disciplines, will provide a software that will draw live the eight opponents of the club whose ball has just been selected, manually from the urn placed on the stage.
Each of the 36 clubs, starting with those in Tier 1 and going down to Tier 4 (or 6 for the Conference), will have their ball drawn at random from the urn and then their opponents will be displayed in real time. The computer must respect two criteria: a club cannot play against a team belonging to the same league, nor against more than two teams from the same league. For example, Juventus will not be able to face Atalanta, nor three Premier League clubs.
The computer's choices will be immediately checked by two other independent systems. Everything will then be verified and supervised by the audit firm EY.
The draw is expected to last 35 minutes, roughly the same as previous years' draws. Without automation, more than a thousand balls would have had to be drawn from 36 different urns in the space of three hours. The match schedule for this phase will be available on Saturday, August 31.
