GoKawiilUEFA's Champions League 36-team draw shown to create unfair team clusters, study proposes fix
An analysis of UEFA's new league-phase draw format found that certain groups of five clubs, such as Napoli, Benfica, Chelsea, Ajax and Qarabağ in the 2025-26 Champions League, end up playing nine of ten possible matchups against each other, far more than random chance would suggest. The same clustering pattern appears across multiple seasons and competitions, including the Europa League and Conference League. The study proposes replacing the current draw method with a mathematically symmetric structure called a Cayley graph on 36 vertices, which would provably eliminate such clusters with only a minor adjustment to the existing country-restriction rule.