THE English firm providing the software for the Champions League draw have assured fans that they will be safe from potential hackers.
Manchester City, Arsenal, Liverpool and Aston Villa will find out their fate in Europe’s elite competition in Monaco tomorrow evening in a completely new format.
Instead of eight groups of four with each team drawn by hand, the 2024/25 campaign will instead feature a 36-team league with teams playing eight games home and away.
The draw will also be different – largely generated by AI software from the London-based company AE Live – picking each side’s fixtures from four pots of nine teams.
After the first team is drawn manually from pot 1, a button will be pressed on the stage and that team’s eight opponents – four home and four away – are calculated within seconds on a screen.
The software will also have a number of “checkers” within the system to ensure that no team can face more than two teams from the same country, and no team can play against each other from the same nation.
Ernest and Young have been hired to act as consultants and audits for the draw to ensure everything goes smoothly.
And a spokesman for AE Live, when asked about how prepared they are against hackers, said: “We take cyber security very seriously.
“We are always held to account.
“This is a very critical and sensitive issue.
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Each club will play eight matches in the opening phase – against seeded opposition, in a system designed to ensure that teams play opponents of similar difficulty.
The top eight teams in the “final” table will automatically go through to the last 16, where they will be joined by the eight play-off winners of ties between the sides placed ninth to 24th in the table.
Despite there being just eight matches in the opening phase, European matches will be spread over 10 midweek slots.
The new Champions League format also sees the implication of two additional qualifying spots.
They will be awarded to the nations that are top of the “country coefficient” chart each season.
“We have taken the highest industry practices to confirm it will be secure.
“I can assure you as a company we have taken all the steps we can to make sure it is as safe and secure as possible.
“We have gone through the risk assessment but this is not new for us.”
AE Live have been working alongside Uefa since last September to produce the software capable of executing the draw.
The company also have a good relationship with the BBC and Sky Sports having worked on graphics and draws for the FA Cup and the Premier League.
