Celtic and Rangers are ready for a Champions League draw revamp following UEFA admittance.
The competition will be significantly revamped next season—and there are initiatives afoot to make draw more easy.
UEFA determined that the Champions League draw would take “three or four hours” to manually arrange under the competition’s current system, prompting a change this summer.
The governing body of European football is revamping all three of its men’s club championships for the next season, with a 36-team league phase replacing the 32-team Champions League group phase that has been in place since the 1999-2000 season. Every team will face eight different opponents in the league phase as UEFA attempts to create a format that reduces the number of dead rubbers, pits big teams against each other earlier in the competition, and places a premium on league finishing position when it comes to the knockout round.
Celtic and Rangers are battling for the Premiership championship, with Rangers leading by two points with nine matches remaining. The draw format will be of importance to them. The league champions move directly to the group stages, while the runners-up enter Europe’s blue riband tournament in the third qualifying round.
Celtic and Rangers are battling for a place in the Champions League.
Currently, teams are drawn manually from seeded pots, but UEFA’s deputy general secretary Giorgio Marchetti admitted it would be impossible to keep the draw completely manual, estimating that the Champions League draw alone could last “three or four hours” and feature around 900 balls if it continued as it is.
UEFA stated that the actual structure for the draw was still in the final stages of preparation, but that it would be a “hybrid” event with some hand ball drawing and some automation. UEFA stated that any automatic aspects will continue to be independently examined to avoid suspicions of manipulated draws. Teams from the same nation will be separated until the new knockout round play-off, unless there are very extraordinary circumstances, with the new round played by the teams placing ninth to 24th in the league phase.
UEFA will then implement a tennis-style seeding system beginning with the last 16, ensuring that the teams finishing first and second in the league phase are maintained in separate parts of the draw and cannot encounter until the final.
The league phase reserves two European performance places (EPS) for clubs from the nations who had the greatest overall performance in the previous season’s European campaign. Italy and Germany presently occupy those slots, so that the fifth-placed teams in each league – Roma and RB Leipzig – would get the EPS.Manchester United may need to rely on rivals Manchester City and Liverpool winning the Champions League and Europa League to secure a fifth Champions League qualifying spot through the Premier League table, as England is currently one place behind Germany.
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