2026–27 Champions League Draw: Every Club's Fate Revealed as League Phase Pots Take Shape

The final four of the 36 clubs set to participate in the 2026–27 Champions League league phase were confirmed on Wednesday evening, as AEK Athens, Slovan Bratislava, Fenerbahçe and Viking successfully navigated the last playoff round to secure their spots among the sides set to compete on European football's grandest stage.

Austria's LASK, Azerbaijan's Sabah and the returning Bodø/Glimt had booked their places on Tuesday, setting up potential clashes with the likes of Paris Saint-Germain, Real Madrid, Barcelona, Manchester United and Arsenal.

This marks the third consecutive season under UEFA's revamped Champions League format, which scrapped the traditional group stage in favour of a unified league table system.

Every club will take on eight different opponents between September and January, with the fixture schedule determined by the annual draw held at UEFA's headquarters in Nyon, Switzerland on Thursday.

2026–27 Champions League Draw Pots 1–4

The concept is fairly simple. Four draw pots have been created, each containing nine teams.

To determine the eight opponents each club will face in the league phase, two sides are drawn from each pot — one home fixture and one away — based on UEFA's coefficient rankings. The top nine clubs occupy pot one, the following nine fill pot two, and so forth.

Teams cannot be drawn against a club from the same nation at this stage, and UEFA has also implemented a fresh draw rule to ensure greater variety across the league phase schedule. No identical fixture can be repeated for three consecutive years, meaning a Real Madrid trip to Liverpool's Anfield is automatically excluded from this edition's draw.

2026–27 League Phase Match Schedule

A total of 144 matches will be played during the league phase, running from early September through to late January. Only the top eight teams in the final standings will advance directly to the round of 16, while clubs finishing between ninth and 24th must compete in a knockout playoff round. The remaining 12 sides at the bottom are eliminated from the competition.