A new era of Champions League football is almost upon us.
The 2024-25 edition of Europe's biggest club tournament will feature a new format. The group stage will comprise of 36 teams, rather than 32.
Instead of dividing 32 clubs into eight groups of four, the new group stage will be one giant 36-team league.
Unlike in a traditional league where all the teams face each other, each club will only have eight fixtures during the group phase.
Therefore, a group stage draw will still be required and this year it will take place on August 29 in Monaco.
The draw for the group stage of this season's Champions League will be held on August 29
Ahead of the draw ceremony, the 36 teams will be divided into four pots based on their seeding determined by UEFA's coefficient ranking system.
The draw will then see each team given four home fixtures and four away fixtures against eight different opponents.
Each team will be drawn to face two teams from each pot.
After each team has played eight fixtures, the top eight teams in the league table will progress to the round of 16, while the sides ranked ninth to 24th will go into a playoff round.
The new format may sound a little more complicated, because it is.
So, to make the draw process flow more smoothly, UEFA has decided to trust the whole thing to computers.
Gone are the days of UEFA delegates and former players nervously sweating as they carefully pick pieces of paper, hidden inside Kinder Egg-style plastic pods, from various bowls.
There will still be some bowls and balls, but we will get to that shortly.
There were 32 teams in eight groups last season, but there will now be one big 36-team league
The revamped system will make the draw ceremony quicker and less tedious but it is also likely to increase suspicion among fans.
While the old-fashioned method was quirky and outdated, there was a sense of transparency. Even so, there were always plenty of wild allegations from biased fans claiming that the draws had been rigged by UEFA to favour the bigger teams.
Expect those allegations and conspiracy theories to grow louder now that the entire fixture list is simply downloaded from a computer.
Another fear among fans will be that the new draw format could potentially be vulnerable to cyber attacks and outside manipulation.
IT company AE Live have been trusted with carrying out the technological part of the draw. AE Live CEO David Gill - not the former Manchester United executive - joined UEFA directors Giorgio Marchetti and Tobias Hedstuck on stage to answer questions on the new procedure at a recent event.
Several questions related to how the public might react to a computer conducting a draw.
UEFA officials Tobias Hedtstuck (left) and Tom Barlow (right) pictured earlier this month during the draw ceremony for this season's Champions League playoff round
In a bid to maintain a personal touch and, presumably to extend each draw ceremony long enough to justify hundreds of big cheeses flying out to Monaco, a UEFA ambassador will still do some of the work by hand.
The draw process will start with four pots, each containing nine balls carrying the name of a team.
A human will open the balls one by one, at which point the computer will reveal that team's eight opponents.
Of course, by the time the unnecessary human gets to pot four, the teams in that pot will already know the identities of most of their opponents.
Group stage fixtures this season will start on September 17 and finish on January 29.