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

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

The Champions League draw will be overhauled this summer after UEFA calculated that it would take “three or four hours” to stage the draw manually under the competition’s new format.

The governing body of European football is revamping all three of its men’s club championships for the coming 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.

With Celtic and Rangers battling for the Premiership title – Rangers lead their Old Firm opponents by two points with nine games remaining – the draw format will be of interest to them. The league champions move directly to the group stages, while the runners-up enter Europe’s blue riband competition in the third qualifying round.

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 format for the draw was still in the final stages of development, but that it would be a “hybrid” event with some manual ball drawing and some automation. UEFA stated that any automatic aspects would continue to be independently examined to avoid suspicions of rigged draws. Teams from the same country will be kept apart until the new knockout round play-off, save in very unusual situations. The new round will be played by the teams finishing ninth to 24th in the league phase.

UEFA will then implement a tennis-style seeding system beginning with the last 16, ensuring that the clubs 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 countries 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 receive the EPS. England is one place behind Germany, which could put Manchester United in the unusual position of hoping bitter rivals Manchester City and Liverpool win the Champions League and Europa League, respectively, to potentially open up a fifth Champions League qualifying spot through the Premier League table.

Get more related news on https://sportviewers.com