The Champions League draw is almost upon us as we get to find out who we’ll face in this season’s League Phase.
In 2024/25, we won six of our eight League Phase games, finishing in third place to secure our spot in the round of 16.
29 of the 36 sides have already been confirmed for the League Phase, and with the qualifying rounds at their final stages, here are all the details you need about when the draw is taking place.
The draw for the League Phase will take place on Thursday, August 28, 2025, the day after the conclusion of the qualifying rounds.
It will take place at the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco, and will be streamed live on UEFA’s website at 5pm UK.
There are a number of rules surrounding the Champions League draw. One is that we cannot face fellow Premier League teams. This means we will not play Liverpool, Manchester City, Chelsea, Newcastle United or Tottenham at this stage of the competition.
The four pots are determined by UEFA club coefficient. We will be in pot 2 for this draw, alongside Bayer Leverkusen, Atletico Madrid, Atalanta, Villarreal, Juventus and Eintracht Frankfurt. The remaining sides for this pot are yet to be confirmed.
Pot 1 consists of Paris Saint-Germain, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, Inter Milan, Borussia Dortmund and Barcelona, alongside Premier League teams Liverpool, Manchester City and Chelsea.
PSV Eindhoven, Ajax, Napoli, Sporting Lisbon, Olympiakos, Slavia Prague and Marseille will all be in pot 3, with Athletic Club, Galatasaray, Union Saint-Gilloise and Newcastle confirmed as being in pot 4.
We will play two teams from each pot, one at home and one away, and we also cannot be drawn against more than two teams from the same country.
The play-off round of the Champions League qualifying stages is currently being held. Here are the current scores of the two-legged affairs, with the return fixtures being played today and tomorrow.
Following the introduction of the League Phase last season, the format will continue in 2025/26, with each team playing eight matches against eight different teams, four at home and four away.
The top eight sides in the league qualify automatically for the knockout stage, while the teams finishing in ninth to 24th place will compete in a two-legged play-off to secure their path into the last 16.
Two of the additional league phase places go to the associations with the best collective performance by their clubs in the previous season. England and Spain performed the best in 2024/25, meaning an extra place was allocated to the Premier League and La Liga.
In 2024/25, we finished in third place in the league phase with 19 points, winning six of our eight matches and conceding just three goals.
Our first match of the league phase will take place between September 16-18, with five more rounds of games taking place in 2025. These will be held on September 30-October 1, October 21-22, November 4-5, November 25-26, and December 9-10.
The final two league phase games will happen in January. The penultimate match will take place on January 20-21 before all 36 sides play at the same time in the final set of matches on Wednesday, January 28, 2026.
The teams that finish in the top eight of the league phase will go automatically through to the round of 16, with sides placed ninth through to 24th competing in the two-legged knockout phase play-off.
The draw for the knockout play-offs rounds will be carried out on January 30, 2026, with the two legs taking place on February 17-18 and February 24-25.
After that, the draw for the round of 16, quarter-finals, semi-finals and final will all happen on February 27, 2026.
The round of 16 matches will occur on March 10-11 and March 17-18. Quarter-final matches will be held on April 7-8 and April 14-15, before the semi-finals on April 28-29 and May 5-6.
The final will be held at the at Puskas Arena, in Budapest, Hungary, on Saturday, May 30, 2026. It will be the first time that the nation has hosted the final of the competition.
