- There would be 32 or 36 teams in one division that is split into four pots of
seeds
- A draw takes place to allocate opponents for each club to play ten matches. A
top-seeded team would face two other top seeds, three each from pots two and
three, and two more teams from the fourth seeds. Half the matches would be at
home, half away.
- Results feed into a league table of all 32 teams with the top 16 going through
to the knock-out rounds. The top of the league would play the team finishing
16th, second place v 15th and so on. The eight teams finishing in 17th to 24
places would go into the Europa League knockout competition.
- The final semi-finalists (or quarter-finalists) would qualify automatically
for the following year’s Champions League.
The Times used a random draw generator to draw up potential opponents for two
English clubs based on the seeding pots for this season’s Champions League (no
English opponents permitted). It produced this outcome:
Liverpool (pot 1) would have matches against Real Madrid (pot 1), Paris Saint-
Germain (pot 1), Borussia Dortmund (pot 2), Shakhtar Donetsk (pot 2), Ajax (pot
2), RB Leipzig (pot 3), Lazio (pot 3), Krasnodar (pot 3), Club Bruges (pot 4)
and Rennes (pot 4).
A random draw for Manchester City (pot 2) would result in matches against Bayern
Munich (pot 1), Porto (pot 1), Real Madrid (pot 1), Barcelona (pot 2), Borussia
Dortmund (pot 2), Dynamo Kiev (pot 3), Inter Milan (pot 3), Lokmotiv Moscow (pot
4), Borussia Mönchengladbach (pot 4) and Ferencvaros (pot 4).
