The Most Complicated Tournament in Sports

Happy Sunday! It’s been a very dynamic week in the sports world, especially on the international front. Champions League games ⚽️, World Baseball Classic in full swing ⚾️, Six Nations’ dramatic finale 🏉, and much more.

One thing I’ve learned in doing this now for a couple of years is that there’s really no lull in the sports calendar, just happy little tournaments sprinkled in.

Champions League explained - IG, TT, YT
How Spotify pays artists - IG, TT, YT
Six Nations explained - IG, TT, YT

As always, we have prints of every page I draw at our print shop here

Imagine a map of Europe covering 55 nations, with a pin dropped on every top-tier professional football club, from the Bernabéu to a muddy pitch in the Faroe Islands. You'd end up with more than 700 pins scattered across the continent. Now imagine someone slowly pulling those pins out, one by one, all summer long, until only 36 remain.

That, in essence, is Champions League qualification.

Of course, for most of those 700 clubs, the Champions League is more fantasy than reality. The realistic pool of potential entrants sits at around 80+ clubs drawn from those 55 countries.

How many spots each country gets depends on UEFA's coefficient rankings, essentially a five-year performance table for national leagues shown in the table below. The better a country's clubs perform in European competitions, the more Champions League spots that league earns.

The heavyweights like England, Spain, Germany, and Italy received multiple automatic places, while smaller leagues may only scrape together one, and that team usually has to fight through qualifying just to reach the main competition.

Even within the qualifying group, the path isn’t equal.

Clubs from smaller leagues with lower coefficients have to survive up to four separate qualifying rounds just to reach the main stage. Meanwhile, teams from stronger leagues, say a Premier League club like Manchester City, skip all of that and enter directly.

Different starting lines, same finish line.

Once the final 36 teams are set, we reach the league phase. Each club is placed into one of four seeding pots based on their UEFA club coefficient, then plays eight matches competing for 24 spots in the knockout stage.

There were plenty of visual options for showing teams progressing and dropping out, a Sankey diagram being the obvious one.

But I wanted something more literal.

Every team in the video is represented as a single brick, and those same bricks move forward through every stage of the tournament. No switching to percentages, no pie charts halfway through. One team = one brick, the whole way. That consistency (hopefully) made the whole thing much easier to follow.

While working on the visualization, one thing really stood out: the sheer scale of the filtering process.

The 2026 World Cup takes 48 teams from a field of around 200. The Champions League whittles 700+ clubs down to 36. It's a different scale entirely, and that whole filtering process, playing out quietly over the summer before a ball is kicked, is the hidden story barely talked about.

⚾️ Preparing for opening pitch in MLB
🏎️ Some nuances of the F1 starting line
🏀 The most important basketball trading card ever

Hope everyone has a great week, and as always, feel free to respond with any feedback. We’re all ears.

More drawings soon.

— Riley & Claire