dinamo | DynamoDB ORM for Ruby | Object-Relational Mapping library

I have my dataframe as:

I want to make a program that randomly simulates the flow of a champions league tournament (football/soccer tournament). The format of the tournament is as follows:

1. There are 32 teams that qualify each year.
2. The teams are then randomly distributed into 8 groups containing 4 teams each.
3. The teams all play each other and 2 of the best performing ones qualify to the next round (round of sixteen)
4. The matchups are decided by randomly selecting the teams 2 at a time with the constraint that no two teams from the same group may face each other again
5. The winner then progresses to the next stage and so on and so forth until we have a winner.

In my program I have tried to implement this format using the random module in python. However, once every 4-5 iterations I get an index error at either the round of 16 selection step or the quarter final selection step. I cant seem to understand why. Please help

I'm scraping multiple sports betting websites in order to compare the odds for each match across the websites.

My question is how to identify match_id from a match that already exists in the DB but has team names written in a different way.
Please feel free to add any approaches even if they don't use dataframes or SQLite.

The columns for matches table are:
match_id: int, sport: string, home_team: string, away_team: string, date: string (dd/mm/YYY)

So for each new match I want to verify if it already exists in the DB.
New match = (sport_to_check, home_team_to_check, away_team_to_check, date_to_check)
My pseudo-code is like: