Champions League Phase Simulations
The Champions League draw took place in Monaco earlier today and it doesn’t have the same buzz as it used to.
Most of that has to do with scraping the group format for a league phase, so now we’re are simply figuring out each teams schedule.
As a reminder these are computer generated based on a software with the parameters that each team play two teams from Pot 1, Pot 2, Pot 3, and Pot 4, they cannot play an opponent from their own country, and they cannot play more than two teams from the same country.
Here were the pots before the draw:
image via Champions League on X
The benefit now of the league phase is we get so many more high profile matches and most importantly every single match matters.
There are four newcomers in the Champions League this season: Pafos out of Cyprus, Bodo/Glimt from Norway, Union St. Gilloise out of Belgium, and Kairat Almaty out of Kazakhstan.
When we get closer to the first round of matches I will do an article on how I project out Champions League matches, but today is simply about getting the simulations out in a timely manner.
Since the Champions League has expanded to 24 teams in the knockout phase it doesn’t make much sense to spend countless hours trying to simulate out the winner, so I’ll save that for when we reach the knockout stage.
Below I have simulated the League Phase 10,000 times using a Monte Carlo simulation:
