The first draw has been made! And it has sensationally thrown Brugge into the silver side, and Sporting in the blue.

In their infinite wisdom Uefa are going to draw all the unseeded teams followed by all the seeded teams. In other words, they’ll draw half of all the ties followed by the other half of all the ties, meaning it’ll be a while before any actual pairings are confirmed.

Uefa are still preambling. I have learned that one side of the draw will be silver and the other side will be blue.

Uefa are going big on the preambles here, so I’ve got time to remind you of the basic rules. There are eight seeded teams and eight unseeded teams. The two seeded teams with the highest league finish will be drawn against the two unseeded teams with the lowest league finish and so on, until everyone’s paired up. So Atalanta will play Sporting or Brugge, and Borussia Dortmund will play the other one, while PSG will play Monaco or Brest and Benfica will get the other one. You can play teams from your own country, and teams you played in the group. Got it? Great.

Seeded teams
9. Atalanta
10. Borussia Dortmund
11. Real Madrid
12. Bayern Munich
13. Milan
14. PSV Eindhoven
15. Paris Saint-Germain
16. Benfica

Unseeded teams
17. Monaco
18. Brest
19. Feyenoord
20. Juventus
21. Celtic
22. Manchester City
23. Sporting CP
24. Club Brugge

Here’s the final Champions League group stage megatable:

Brace yourself for the Champions League draw, which starts in just a few minutes. Today’s draws will be broadcast live in the UK by TNT Sports and on their YouTube channel, here:

And here is a healthy dollop of further transfer gossip:

Here’s more on the future of Evan Ferguson, with Chelsea joining a six-way race for his services as we go into the final weekend of the transfer window:

The Brighton manager, Fabian Hurzeler, has said that the reason he has been limiting the playing time of the club’s record signing, Georginio Rutter, is that he has “issues with his muscles” that means “we have to protect his health”.

Rutter has played only two full games since signing for the club from Leeds for £40m last August, and has played more than 45 minutes only once since Christmas, against Norwich in the FA Cup.

“There have been some small issues with his muscles and therefore we also need to protect his health,” Hurzeler said ahead of Saturday’s trip to Nottingham Forest. “I know that it is not always understandable why we choose the starting XI, but there are so many things going on.

“The main thing for me is that I am responsible for the person behind the player, to protect him and protect his health. It’s not only a decision about performance, especially when young players get injured.”

Chelsea join race for Brighton’s Evan Ferguson

Champions League and Europa League draws will be happening over the next couple of hours: the Champions League goes first, at 12pm CET/11am GMT, with the Europa League an hour later.

In short the teams that finished between ninth and 16th in both league stages will be seeded, and those that finished between 17th and 24th will be unseeded. In each pairing the unseeded team will, unless there’s a good reason not to, play the second leg at home. So far, so straightforward.

Beyond that, and to add a bonus level of complication, sides have been paired for the draw. So the ninth and 10th-placed teams can only play either the 23rd or the 24th-placed teams, and so on until 15th and 16th play 17th and 18th.

Then in the quarter-finals the teams that progressed directly from the group in first and second place will face the winners of those 15th/16th/17th/18th playoffs and so on from there, until the teams that finished seventh and eighth play the winners of the ninth/10th/23rd/24th playoffs. In each of these pairs, one will go into the top half of the draw and one into the bottom.

All clear? Good.

Hello world!