European football’s elite – including Real Madrid, Barcelona, Liverpool, Arsenal, Bayern Munich and champions PSG – find out their fate for the league phase.
The revamped UEFA Champions League enters its second season in 2025-2026 with the draw for the first stage taking place on Thursday.
The qualification period ended on Wednesday with some shock eliminations, including Scottish powerhouses Glasgow Rangers and Celtic and Turkish giants Fenerbahce.
The league phase will now get under way to decide who qualifies directly for the final knockout stages and who will head into the playoffs or worse – elimination.
Al Jazeera Sport takes a look at Thursday’s draw at 6pm (17:00 GMT) in Monaco:
French giants PSG stormed to the Champions League trophy with a 5-0 demolition of Italy’s Inter Milan in last season’s final.
Desire Doue grabbed the headlines with his match-winning performance, including two goals for the then-19-year-old.
Real endured a tough season in Spain and on the continent. The Madrid club were eliminated at the quarterfinal stage by Arsenal.
Los Blancos, who were the defending Champions League winners, also lost their Spanish title to fierce rivals Barcelona.
The Catalan club were widely expected to reach the Champions League final but were eliminated by Inter, who staged a late comeback in the second leg of their record-equalling semifinal.
The Premier League’s big three are joined by fellow English sides Chelsea, the FIFA Club World Cup winners, and Tottenham, the Europa League winners, in this year’s competition.
All eyes will be on Liverpool, who won a record-equalling 20th Premier League title last season. The Reds also topped last season’s league phase in the Champions League but were eliminated by PSG on penalties in the round of 16.
Arsenal’s impressive run was ended in the last four by PSG while Manchester City were dumped out in the playoffs by fellow strugglers Real.
Last season’s Champions League expanded to 36 clubs from the previous 32-team set-up. The size and format remain the same this time around.
As per last season’s revamp, the 36 qualified teams will play in a league phase with each side playing eight matches based on Thursday’s draw.
The ceremony has four seeded pots of nine clubs to decide who will play whom in the first stage of the competition.
The top eight teams will qualify directly for the round of 16. The following 16 sides will enter into home and away playoffs to reach the next round. The bottom eight teams in the league phase will be eliminated.
Since 2003, the Champions League had featured 32 clubs split into eight groups of four with the top two from each section advancing to the last 16.
Every club will play two teams from each pot, one at home and one away.
No team will come up against another club from the same domestic league as them, and every club can face a maximum of only two teams from any one country.
Pot 1: Paris Saint-Germain, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, Inter Milan, Borussia Dortmund, Barcelona, Liverpool, Manchester City, Chelsea
Pot 2: Arsenal, Bayer Leverkusen, Atletico Madrid, Atalanta, Villarreal, Juventus, Eintracht Frankfurt, Benfica, Club Brugge
Pot 3: Tottenham Hotspur, PSV Eindhoven, Ajax, Napoli, Sporting CP, Olympiacos, Slavia Prague, Marseille, Bodo/Glimt
Pot 4: Monaco, Galatasaray, Union Saint-Gilloise, Athletic Club, Newcastle United, Pafos, Kairat Almaty, Copenhagen, Qarabag
A total of 144 games will be played in the league phase. Before last season, 96 games constituted what was then the group stage.
UEFA now operates a hybrid draw rather than the solely manual tradition that has been, and still is, used widely across the world.
Each of the 36 teams are still manually drawn, working through the four seeding pots from top to bottom. The drawing of their opponents, however, is now to be done digitally, taking little more than a second per team.
Once the teams are drawn manually, the software picks the opponents and where the teams will play – home or away.
Matchday 1: September 16-17
Matchday 2: September 30-October 1
Matchday 3: October 21-22
Matchday 4: November 4-5
Matchday 5: November 25-26
Matchday 6: December 9-10
Matchday 7: January 20-21
Matchday 8: January 28
No. The bottom 12 teams in the league phase will be simply eliminated.
Clubs involved in the league phase of the Champions League will have $2.6bn distributed among them.
The winner of the Champions League, along with all other teams, will be rewarded on a game-by-game basis.
Should the eventual champion win all their games throughout the competition, then more than 100 million euros ($116m) can be claimed.
Similarly to the FIFA Club World Cup, UEFA has introduced a series of other payments, making the eventual total difficult to define.
Participation fees, performance bonuses, league phase ranking bonuses, knockout stage payments and a value pillar, which combines payments based on a club’s historical UEFA coefficient ranking and their share of the broadcast market, will all be used to decide overall payments.
Qualifying for the final alone will result in an 18.5-million-euro ($21.5m) reward while the winning finalist will receive an additional 6.5 million euros ($7.5m).
