Ligalytics x EPCR - Integrated Design for Europe’s Elite Club Rugby

The European Professional Club Rugby (EPCR) tournaments - the Investec Champions Cup and EPCR Challenge Cup - represent the pinnacle of cross-border rugby in Europe. Bringing together the best clubs from the English Gallagher Prem, France’s Top 14, and the United Rugby Championship (URC), these competitions combine intensity, complexity, and tradition. Ligalytics works alongside EPCR to design a fully integrated process covering the league structure, pool draw, and match scheduling, ensuring fairness, transparency, and operational excellence across all stages.

The Challenge

Managing Europe’s top-tier rugby competitions means balancing a dense matrix of leagues, nations, and rules. The EPCR format features 24 clubs in the Investec Champions Cup and 18 in the EPCR Challenge Cup, each playing four pool-stage rounds between Friday and Sunday.

To ensure competitive integrity, the draw rules are particularly strict: • Each pool includes no more than two clubs from the same domestic league. • Clubs from the same URC Shield (Irish, South African, Scottish/Italian, Welsh) cannot be drawn together. • Each team plays two home and two away games, with a fair distribution across weekends.

Once the draw is complete, EPCR faces another layer of complexity: building schedules that align with stadium availability, broadcast priorities, long-distance travel, and the overlapping calendars of domestic and international competitions. With Ligalytics’ AI optimization, this complexity is handled in a consistent, data-driven way, turning a highly intricate coordination task into a fast and reliable process.

From Concept to Kick-Off: The Ligalytics Approach

League Design and Structure: Ligalytics supports EPCR in defining the competition framework, ensuring that the number of rounds, matchdays, and weekend distribution achieves an optimal sporting and operational balance.

Optimized Draw Process: Using tailored optimization models, Ligalytics transforms the complex draw logic into a transparent and rule-compliant process. The system automatically enforces restrictions between leagues and shields, preventing invalid combinations while maintaining the randomness and excitement of a public draw.

Smart Scheduling: Building on the draw results, Ligalytics generates a detailed fixture list that accounts for travel distances, rest days, and broadcast preferences. Constraints such as venue clashes and additional stakeholder requirements are integrated directly into the algorithm, allowing multiple valid scenarios to be tested within minutes.

Impact and Conclusion

Through this integrated approach, EPCR is able to finalize both the draw and the complete fixture list while achieving full compliance with competition rules and stakeholder needs. The result is a transparent, balanced, and logistically optimized season that sets new standards for tournament planning.

Ligalytics’ combination of sports expertise and AI optimization turns one of rugby’s most complex scheduling challenges into a repeatable, scalable success model for international multi-league competitions.