The UEFA Champions League is Europe's leading club competition, bringing together the strongest clubs from domestic leagues across the continent. Since the 2024-25 season it has used a new structure: a single league phase of thirty-six clubs, followed by knockout rounds that end in a one-match final. If the old group stage confused you, the new format is actually simpler once you see the shape of it.

The league phase: one table, thirty-six clubs

Forget groups. All thirty-six clubs sit in one overall league table. Each club plays eight matches against eight different opponents: four at home and four away. No club plays the same opponent twice in the league phase, and no club plays every other club; eight opponents out of thirty-five possible is the whole point of the design, giving each club a varied set of fixtures.

Opponents are chosen by a draw built around four seeded pots of nine clubs each, based mainly on UEFA club coefficients, with the defending champions placed as the top seed in Pot 1. Each club is drawn against two opponents from every pot, one at home and one away. Clubs from the same national association cannot be drawn against each other in the league phase, and a club can face at most two opponents from any one other association.

Points work the way they do in domestic leagues: three for a win, one for a draw, none for a defeat. After all eight rounds, the single table decides everything.

Who advances, and who goes out

The league phase has three cut lines, and they are the key to the whole competition:

• Clubs finishing first to eighth advance directly to the round of 16, as seeded clubs.
• Clubs finishing ninth to twenty-fourth enter a two-legged knockout play-off round. The eight play-off winners join the top eight in the round of 16.
• Clubs finishing twenty-fifth to thirty-sixth are eliminated from European competition for the season. There is no drop-down into the Europa League from the league phase.

In the play-offs, the clubs ranked ninth to sixteenth are seeded and the clubs ranked seventeenth to twenty-fourth are unseeded, and each tie is played over two legs, one at each club's ground. The winners advance; the losers are out.

The knockout rounds

From the round of 16 onwards, the competition is a straight knockout. The round of 16, quarter-finals and semi-finals are all two-legged ties, decided on aggregate score across the two matches. If a tie is level on aggregate after the second leg, extra time is played, and if it is still level, a penalty shoot-out decides who advances.

The final is different: a single match at a pre-selected neutral venue. If the final is level after ninety minutes, extra time follows, and then penalties if needed. One night, one trophy, no second leg.

How clubs qualify

Clubs reach the Champions League mainly through their domestic leagues. UEFA allocates places to each national association based on the UEFA country coefficients, which measure how well that country's clubs have performed in Europe over recent seasons. Stronger leagues receive more automatic places; smaller leagues receive fewer, and some of their clubs must come through qualifying rounds before the league phase.

There is one other route worth knowing: the winner of the UEFA Europa League earns automatic entry into the following season's Champions League, regardless of where that club finished in its domestic league. So a club that misses out through the league can still reach the Champions League by winning Europe's second competition.

How this differs from the old format

Under the previous format, thirty-two clubs were split into eight groups of four, each club playing the other three home and away for six matches, with the top two in each group reaching the round of 16. The new format replaces groups with a single table, raises the field from thirty-two to thirty-six clubs, raises each club's matches from six to eight, and adds the play-off round for the middle of the table. The practical effect is more varied fixtures early in the competition: a club can face opponents from every seeded pot, including other top seeds, before the knockouts even begin.

Questions, answered

How many teams are in the league phase? Thirty-six.

How many games does each club play in the league phase? Eight, against eight different opponents.

What happens to the clubs ranked 25th to 36th? They are eliminated from Europe for the season.

Is the final two-legged? No. The final is a single match at a neutral venue.

Can a club qualify by winning the Europa League? Yes. The Europa League winner earns a Champions League place for the next season.

Sources

Format facts in this guide follow UEFA's competition format introduced for the 2024-25 season: thirty-six league-phase clubs, eight matches per club (four home, four away), direct round-of-16 places for positions one to eight, two-legged play-offs for positions nine to twenty-four, elimination for positions twenty-five to thirty-six, and two-legged knockout ties ending in a single-match final.

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