Champions League Format: How the 36-Team League Phase Works

What Is the Champions League Format Now?

The Champions League format changed in a major way for the 2024–25 season, when UEFA dropped the old groups and grew the field from 32 clubs to 36. Every club plays eight separate opponents in a single league table, the top 24 move on to the knockout rounds, and the trophy is decided in a one-off final. The field is made up of national league champions and, for some nations, runners-up as well.

The competition starts at the beginning of July with qualifying: three rounds plus a play-off, each decided over two legs. Seven clubs come through that route and join 29 that already had places secured, making up the 36-club field. From there the campaign runs to a final in late May or early June.

How the League Phase Works

Since 2024–25, a league phase has replaced the group stage in all three of UEFA's club competitions. Instead of eight groups of four, the 36 clubs are ranked together in one table, similar to a Swiss-system setup. Each club meets eight separate opponents over eight matches, with the fixtures split evenly between home and away.

The draw works through seeding pots. Clubs are sorted into four pots by UEFA coefficient, and every club then draws two opponents from each pot, with one of those two meetings played at its own stadium.

League-phase fixtures run from September through January, mostly on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings. The knockout phase takes over in February.

Who Goes Straight to the Round of 16?

The eight clubs at the top of the league-phase table advance directly to the round of 16 without playing an extra tie. They also enter that draw as the seeded clubs.

Everyone else in the top 24 has to play a knockout play-off first. Clubs that finish 9th through 16th are seeded in that round, clubs that finish 17th through 24th are unseeded, and the eight winners join the round of 16 as unseeded clubs.

The Knockout Play-Off Round Explained

The knockout play-off is the extra round created to connect the league phase to the round of 16. Each tie is played over two legs, pairing the clubs that finished 9th to 16th against those that finished 17th to 24th.

The stakes end there for the losers. The eight clubs beaten in the play-offs, along with every club that finishes 25th to 36th, are out of European football for the season, because the league phase no longer leads into the Europa League.

Knockout Rounds and the Final

From the round of 16 on, the tournament follows a familiar knockout path of quarter-finals and semi-finals, with both of those rounds played over two legs. At this stage there is no draw protection keeping clubs from the same association apart. The final is a single match at a venue chosen before the season, typically in late May or early June.

The champion earns automatic entry to the next season's Champions League along with the UEFA Super Cup, the FIFA Intercontinental Cup and the FIFA Club World Cup. That Club World Cup is staged every four years.

How Clubs Qualify

Most places are earned through domestic leagues, and how many clubs an association gets depends on its UEFA coefficient. Coefficients are built from the results of that association's clubs over the previous five seasons of the Champions League, Europa League and Conference League. A higher coefficient means more entrants and entry at later stages of qualifying.

The five best-ranked leagues each send four clubs by default, with more places possible based on how the previous season went. Since 2024–25, the two associations with the strongest coefficient from the season before each get one extra league-phase place, called a European Performance Spot, and the Champions League and Europa League winners cannot take those spots.

Clubs without direct entry go through qualifying in two separate streams, one for national champions and one for clubs that placed second, third or fourth at home. Five of the seven remaining places go to the winners of a four-round tournament among the other 43 or 44 champions, with byes into later rounds for champions from stronger associations. The final two places go to the winners of a three-round tournament for ten or eleven clubs from associations ranked from 5–6 through 15.

Results alone are not enough. Every club must hold a licence from its national association by meeting stadium, infrastructure and financial standards, and the holder of the title is guaranteed a place the next year no matter where it finishes domestically.

The Format Before 2024–25

Before the revamp, 32 clubs were divided into eight four-team groups, with the draw seeded by coefficient and a rule against two clubs from the same association sharing a group. Each club played six matches, home and away against its three group rivals, from September to December. The top two in each group advanced, third-placed clubs moved across to the Europa League, and fourth-placed clubs were knocked out.

In the round of 16, group winners were matched with runners-up from other groups, again keeping same-association clashes out, and the draws were fully random from the quarter-finals onward. The new structure raised the number of clubs from 32 to 36 and the number of matches per club from six to eight, and added a knockout play-off round that never existed before.