This season's Champions League is having a bit of trouble before the group draw. Leandro Shara - a Chilean sports consultant - is threatening to sue UEFA because he believes the organization has illegally used his tournament model.
As introduced last year, UEFA will apply the "Swiss model" to their three club competitions from this season: the Champions League, Europa League and Europa Conference League. This is a format that sports fans can easily see in chess tournaments but is applied to football for the first time.
With the increased number of teams (from 32 to 36), UEFA will have to come up with a format that is both more competitive and divides the duration of the rounds more evenly. This new model forces teams that want to raise the championship title to have to play many matches in the outer ring, somewhat similar to the format of national championships, instead of playing cups.
Due to the complexity of this new structure, in Monaco this evening, computers will replace humans in drawing lots as quickly and accurately as possible. The 36 teams will be divided into 4 equal seed groups. The specific match schedule will be announced this Saturday after the 36 teams know which branch they will be in.
In fact, this new format is not 100% true to the "Swiss model". The reason is because in the next round, UEFA will re-draw the match schedule so that the winning teams continue to meet in deeper rounds.
All of the above are things Shara complained about and said that UEFA copied his model without asking permission. Shara has registered the copyright for a similar tournament model called "pots" in Chile since 2006. He said he had talked about such an organization with UEFA since 2013.
Shara sent a complaint to UEFA, directly to President Aleksander Ceferin and General Secretary Theodore Theodoridis and 6 other members. In the complaint, Shara said that the method UEFA is applying is based on his past initiatives.
For now, Shara doesn't want to make the problem worse. He asked UEFA to invite himself and three colleagues at MatchVision company to Monaco to attend the Champions League draw . Along with that, Shara also wanted to stand up and say that this format was invented by him. If UEFA wants to use it, this organization must sign a copyright purchase contract from MatchVision.
The deadline for Shara's complaint requesting UEFA to resolve is August 28. Currently, this organization has not yet responded. Therefore, UEFA may face a legal lawsuit right before the Champions League group stage of the new season.
Currently, UEFA has not made any comments on copyrighted information. It is expected that after the draw in Monaco, everything will be resolved.
