This season's Champions League is in a bit of a mess ahead of the draw for the group stage. Leandro Shara, a Chilean sports consultant, is threatening to sue UEFA for allegedly using his tournament model.
As introduced last year, UEFA will apply the "Switzerland model" to their three club-level tournaments from this season: Champions League, Europa League and Europa Conference League. This is a format that sports fans can easily find in chess tournaments but is being applied for the first time in football.
With the increase in the number of teams (from 32 to 36), UEFA will have to think of a more competitive format and divide the duration of the rounds equally. This new model forces teams that want to improve their championship titles to play many matches in the outside round, somewhat similar to the format of national championships, instead of playing in cups.
Due to the complexity of this new structure, in Monaco tonight, computers will replace humans in drawing to make it fastest and most accurate. 36 teams will be divided into 4 seed groups. The specific match schedule will be announced this Saturday after 36 teams know which branch they will be in.
In fact, this new format is not necessarily 100% true to the "Switches model". The reason is that in the next round, UEFA will draw a new match schedule so that the winning teams can continue to meet each other in deeper rounds.
All of the above are things Shara complained about and claimed UEFA had exported his model without permission. Shara has registered the copyright for a similar tournament model called "pots" in Chile since 2006. He said that he had been talking about how to organize like that for UEFA since 2013.
Shara has filed a complaint with UEFA, directly to President Aleksander Ceferin and General Secretary Theodore Theodoridis and 6 other members. In the complaint, Shara said the way UEFA is using it is rooted in his past initiatives.
For now, Shara does not want to aggravate the problem. He asked UEFA to invite himself and 3 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 to be resolved by UEFA is August 28. Currently, this organization has not responded. Therefore, UEFA could face a legal dispute right before the group stage of the new season's Champions League.
UEFA has not yet commented on the claim. It is expected that after the draw in Monaco, everything will be resolved.
