The Champions League draw is on Thursday, and four of the 36 places are still open

The Champions League league-phase draw takes place at the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco on Thursday, at 6pm local time, which is 9.30pm in India. Thirty-six teams, eight opponents each, and a supercomputer that produces the whole thing at the press of a button. What used to be a two-hour ceremony of men pulling balls out of bowls is now over in a few minutes.

Four of the 36 do not yet know they are in it. Those places are settled on Wednesday night.

Four play-off ties, all of them level

Twenty-nine clubs qualified directly last season. Seven more come through the play-offs, and three of those seven are already known. Bodo/Glimt went through 6-1 on aggregate. Sabah of Azerbaijan won 5-2 after extra time to beat Hapoel Beer-Sheva 6-4 over the two legs. LASK, who lost the first leg at Celtic 3-0, won the return 5-1 after extra time and knocked Celtic out 5-4 on aggregate, which is the sort of result that gets replayed for years in one city and never mentioned again in the other. Sabah and LASK are both in the Champions League for the first time.

The remaining four ties are all played on Wednesday night and every one of them is level. AEK Athens and Levski Sofia drew 0-0 in the first leg. Dinamo Zagreb and Viking drew 2-2. Slovan Bratislava and Celje drew 1-1. Fenerbahce and Lyon drew 1-1. Whoever loses drops into the Europa League league phase rather than going home, but for the four winners it is Monaco on Thursday and a place in the draw.

Five English clubs, and who sits where

England sends five: Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United and Aston Villa.

Pot 1 goes on UEFA’s club coefficient over the last five seasons, and it holds Paris Saint-Germain, Bayern Munich, Real Madrid, Liverpool, Inter, Manchester City, Arsenal, Barcelona and Atletico Madrid. PSG are in there as back-to-back winners, having beaten Arsenal on penalties in Budapest in May.

Pot 2 has Aston Villa, who qualified by winning the Europa League, alongside Manchester United, Borussia Dortmund, Roma, Sporting, Porto, Club Brugge, PSV and Real Betis. Pot 3 so far reads Feyenoord, Lille, Napoli, RB Leipzig, Villarreal, Shakhtar Donetsk and Galatasaray. The rest, including Stuttgart, Slavia Prague, Como, Lens and Wednesday’s four winners, get sorted into pots 3 and 4 once the field is complete.

How the draw works now

Every club plays eight matches against eight different opponents, two from each pot, four at home and four away. Nobody plays the same team twice, and there are no groups, so the 36 clubs sit in a single table and are ranked against sides they never faced. It is the third season of this format and it still takes a minute to explain.

The reward structure is worth knowing before the draw rather than in January. Finish in the top eight and you go straight to the round of 16. Finish ninth to 24th and you play a two-legged knockout play-off, with the sides placed ninth to 16th seeded and at home in the second leg. Finish 25th or lower and the season is over, with no drop into the Europa League to soften it.

Dates for the diary

Matchday 1 runs from 8 to 10 September, a fortnight on from the draw. The league phase then works through October and November, breaks for Christmas, and ends with matchday 8 on 27 January, the night the table finally sorts itself out. The knockout play-offs are in mid-February, the round of 16 in March, and the final is at the Estadio Metropolitano in Madrid on Saturday 5 June 2027.

Madrid will be hosting its sixth European Cup final, more than anywhere except London, and the Metropolitano’s first was in 2019, when Liverpool beat Tottenham 2-0 there. This is the competition’s 72nd season and the third under the league format.

For anyone watching from India, none of it is friendly to a working week. European kick-offs land here in the small hours, which is the standing price of following this competition, and the January finish is the one to book leave around.

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