The round of 36 is settled, and the new version of the Champions League will be drawn at 24 o'clock tonight! Human-machine combination, software distribution

The reporter reported coldly In the early morning of August 29, Beijing time, the last four games of the 2024/25 Champions League play-offs ended, and the new version of the Champions League was officially released for the new season to be restructured and expanded to 36 teams. At 0:00 Beijing time on August 30, UEFA will conduct the draw ceremony for the Champions League at the Grimaldi Convention Center in Monaco. With 36 teams and 8 games each, the Switzerland new Champions League, an unprecedented format, will change the world of football? There's been a lot of novelty since tonight, at least.

The new version of the Champions League with the "pseudo-Switzerland round" format is a historic innovation. The new version of the Champions League is not grouped, and the 36 teams are divided into 4 pots, each team plays two teams from each bracket, home and away once, and a total of 8 games are played. The division of teams to ensure that the weaker teams in the small and medium-sized leagues can play against the top five league teams reflects the universality that UEFA admires, and is an improvement of the football tradition on the Switzerland round format.

In the Champions League draw at 24 o'clock tonight, Real Madrid, Manchester City, Bayern, Grand Paris, Liverpool, Inter, Borussia Dortmund, RB Leipzig and Barcelona are in Pot 1, Bayer Leverkusen, Atletico Madrid, Atalanta, Juventus, Benfica, Arsenal, Club Brugge, Shakhtar Donetsk and AC Milan are in Pot 2. As a general rule, teams in the same league avoid encounters, and a team can only play against a maximum of two teams from the other league. The "pseudo-Switzerland round" has made the draw process more cumbersome than ever, and the Champions League draw was previously done entirely manually. The new version of the Champions League manually draws the first team, and then the opponents are assigned to the table by Aelive software to complete the draw. If the draw is completely manual, it will be 1296 times, and it may take more than 3 hours to complete the draw.

UEFA will announce the fixtures on Saturday, with the principle that one team cannot play two teams in the same bracket on consecutive matchdays. UEFA wants to create as many matchups as possible to make the game more appealing. The new Champions League matchday is different: the first matchday 18 matches will be played on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday in mid-September, matchdays 2-7 will be played on Tuesday and Wednesday as usual, and matchday 8 will be played in conjunction with matchday eight, which deals with qualification and play-off standings. As a result, the Champions League has surged from 96 matches to 144, from 17 September 2024 to 29 January 2025, occupying the traditional matchday schedule for the two domestic cup competitions in January.

Given that not all teams in the Champions League have a head-to-head record, there are also changes to the new Champions League ranking rules. If the two teams have the same number of points, the ranking will be compared according to the number of goals difference, the number of goals, the number of away goals, the number of wins, the number of away wins, the number of points between the opponents, the goal difference, the number of goals scored and the number of disciplinary penalties.

The knockout rounds are also new: after eight league games, the teams ranked 1-8 will go directly to the round of 16, while the teams in 25-36 will be eliminated directly. A NEW TWO-LEGGED KNOCKOUT PLAY-OFF STAGE OF THE KNOCKOUT PLAYOFFS WILL BE ADDED, WITH THE TEAMS RANKED 9-16 IN THE LEAGUE SEEDED AND THE UNSEEDED TEAMS RANKED 17-24 IN THE LEAGUE IN THE TABLE BELOW TO DETERMINE THE OTHER EIGHT SPOTS IN THE QUARTER-FINALS.

The new version of the Champions League has many new faces, Girona (La Liga), Brest (Ligue 1), Bratislava Slavs (Slovakia) are participating in the Champions League for the first time, Stuttgart (after 14 years), Sparta Prague (after 18 years), Graz Storm (after 23 years), Aston Villa (after 41 years), Bologna (after 60 years) are also new faces who have not been in the Champions League for more than 10 years.

The total prize money of the new version of the Champions League reached 2.467 billion euros, a surge of 445 million euros from last season! The seven teams that were eliminated from the play-offs in the final qualifying round each received 4.29 million euros. The prize money for each team in the main match has increased from 15.64 million euros to 18.85 million euros, with a single win bonus of 2.1 million euros and a draw bonus of 700,000 euros. The ranking prize money is also distributed according to a new criteria: the prize money is divided into 666 parts, and the 36th team receives only one share (275,000 euros), and so on, the first team in the points will receive 9.9 million euros!

The teams ranked 1-8 receive an additional €2 million, and the teams placed 9-16 receive an additional €1 million. The top 16 teams will receive 11 million euros, the top 8 teams will receive 12.5 million euros, the top 4 teams will receive 15 million euros, the two teams will receive 18.5 million euros each, and the champion will receive another 6.5 million euros.

The Champions League winner will also receive €4 million for participation in the UEFA Super Cup, with a €1 million bonus for winning, meaning that next season's Champions League winner will receive a guaranteed share of €86 million.

UEFA has combined the previous market pool with the Champions League performance coefficient bonuses from the past 10 years to form a new value bonus, totalling €37 million less than the previous two bonuses. The competitive prize money has been significantly increased to 925 million euros from the previous 600 million euros, in order to encourage teams to win more games, and the value prize money appears to have decreased slightly, and the big five league clubs will benefit more from broadcasting more games given the greater reliance on rights revenue.

The new version of the Champions League essentially takes more care of the five major league giants in terms of competition system, schedule, and prize distribution, and is actually the UEFA version of the "European Super League". It's just that compared with the naked "big league" of the European Super League, the pseudo-Switzerland round system of division improvement still takes into account fairness and universality.