How will UEFA’s new Champions League format draw be conducted on Thursday?

The eyes of the footballing world will be firmly fixed on Monaco’s Grimaldi Forum next Thursday ahead of the league phase draw for the new season UEFA Champions League with proceedings in the principality expected to commence at 12:00 pm (ET).

The usual pageantry will be on display, tweaked Champions League branding, dignitaries from the 36 participating sides, a scrum of global media anxious to bring the breaking news and of course the presence of UEFA draw stalwarts, Pedro Pinto and Giorgio Marchetti. However, for the first time in history, this will be a draw with a difference as we now have 36 participating teams rather than 32.

For the first time since 2003 when the UCL featured a format tweak with the introduction of a 16-team knockout round instead of a second group stage, the competition has functioned on this basis for over 20 years.

“Too many predictable group stage games with too many dead rubbers” and “can we have more money spinning games” are the claims from fans and clubs respectively with UEFA acting accordingly and introducing the new 36 team league format.

Instead of traditional format that saw all 32 teams being drawn into eight groups of four and playing six group games, the 36 qualified teams will instead take part in eight matches and go into one giant table, with goal difference the first tie-breaker for teams finishing level on points.

Draw mechanics.. mo’ teams mo’ problems

With an additional four teams involved and given the new format, UEFA soon realised that a traditional manual draw would have been a non-starter. “We would have needed 1,000 balls!” Stéphane Anselmo, head of competitions strategic development at UEFA outlined why things won’t be quite the same when teams gather in Monte Carlo on 29 August to learn their fate at the new league phase draw. With more matches, more teams and more permutations, technology will be introduced to figure out who plays who, where and when.

Thursday’s draw instead will be of a hybrid nature with the initial step will see a ball (representing one of each nine teams in four seeded pots) being drawn from a ball from a bowl. Given that are now 36 teams who each need eight opponents drawn it would have been impractical to prepare balls for every possible eligible opponent, so each team’s opponents will now be randomly selected by a super-computer with the software ensuring that the computer calculates all future options simultaneously so that we never find ourselves at a deadlock.

Despite the league phase schedule being confirmed the end of the draw, the precise fixture list with match dates and kick-off times will announced on Saturday 31 August by UEFA.

The dates for the eight UCL 2024/25 matchdays

Other key dates for the 2024/25 season revised Champions League