Europa League and Conference League: how the formats work

The Europa League and the Conference League are UEFA's second and third season-long men's club competitions, below the Champions League. In 2026/27, from the league phase onwards, both are played on Thursdays, with two exceptions set out in the regulations: the finals are on a Wednesday, and the first matchday of the Europa League's league phase is split between Wednesday and Thursday. They take clubs that qualify through their domestic league or cup, clubs that drop out of the Champions League and Europa League qualifying rounds and, in the Europa League's case, the previous Conference League winners. Each ends with a single match at a neutral stadium chosen in advance.

After qualifying in July and August, the main stage of both opens with a league phase under the so-called Swiss system, adopted in 2024/25. In 2026/27 there are 36 clubs in each table, but nobody plays everybody. In the Europa League the clubs are split into four pots of nine, and each club is drawn against two opponents from every pot, one at home and one away: eight matches in all. In the Conference League there are six pots of six and one opponent from each pot. To decide home and away, pots 1 and 2, 3 and 4, and 5 and 6 are paired, and each club hosts one opponent from each pair. A win is worth three points and a draw one.

Why UEFA buried the groups

Until 2023/24, the group stage of both competitions was 32 clubs in eight groups of four, each club playing the other three home and away: six matches per club, twelve per group, ninety-six in total across the eight groups, with the top two in each group advancing and the third dropping into the competition below. The structural flaw showed up early: a group of four settles fast, and a dead rubber, a match with nothing left to decide, would arrive as early as the second-to-last matchday in plenty of groups, with one club already through and another already out mathematically before kick-off. And the strength of the road ahead depended on the draw of a single group: landing in the wrong one was enough to eliminate a strong club before the knockout stage even began, while landing in an easy one carried a weak team forward without it beating anyone of substance.

The Swiss system, adopted in 2024/25, attacks both problems at once. Instead of eight isolated groups of four, it is one single table, with 36 clubs and eight (or six, in the Conference League) different opponents drawn from coefficient-based pots. The final ranking now reflects a much wider sample of results, against rivals of varied strength rather than just the three the draw happened to assign, and because everyone is adding points to the same table, a result on matchday 7 or 8 can still change who goes straight to the round of 16 and who drops to the play-offs, even with most of the table already settled. The name comes from chess: it is the pairing system used in open tournaments too big for everyone to play everyone, matching opponents by strength each round instead of locking clubs into closed groups.

There is a commercial side too, and the arithmetic is straightforward: more matches means more broadcast rights to sell. In the Europa League, the league phase jumped from 96 matches, across the old eight groups of four, to 144; in the Conference League, from 96 to 108. The reform was approved in 2022 after months of consultation with the clubs themselves and the national leagues, and coefficient-based pots throw big-league clubs against other big-league clubs from the very first matchdays, instead of saving that kind of fixture for a possible knockout meeting: more marquee matches early in the season means a bigger audience well before February.

Why Thursday, and why the opening round splits across two days

The split is not a scheduling accident: each of UEFA's three club competitions has a night that is almost entirely its own. The Champions League occupies Tuesday and Wednesday all season; the Europa League and the Conference League share Thursday. Reserving a fixed night for each competition exists so two competing broadcasts are not stacked in the same slot every week, and Thursday is what is left once the Champions League claims the first two useful nights of the European football week.

The opening round breaks that pattern for a volume problem, not a scheduling one: with 36 clubs playing at once, that is 18 simultaneous matches per round in the Europa League, eighteen more in the Conference League. Fitting that into a single broadcast night would overload the channels and UEFA's own refereeing teams, and the fix was to spread the opener across two days, Wednesday and Thursday, with the UEFA administration deciding which fixture falls on which night. From the second round onwards, the whole league phase fits back into Thursday alone.

The tie-break criteria, in order

Policing a 36-club Swiss table takes quite a ruler: one single queue deciding who goes straight to the round of 16, who plays the play-offs, and who is out of Europe until next season. The regulations set ten tie-break criteria, applied in this order, and they are the same in the Europa League and the Conference League:

An away goal is only the 3rd criterion, behind overall goal difference and total goals scored: it does settle ties in practice, but after two coarser filters, not at the first clash of numbers. And the tie-break only reaches club coefficient, the 10th and last criterion, in a rare case: two clubs level on points, goal difference, goals scored, wins, and even on the collective record of the opponents they faced. Before that, the 9th criterion is disciplinary points, and it is fair play deciding a direct spot: two yellow cards cost the same as one red in that tally, and a club can lose a round-of-16 place over a card picked up back in October.

Cut-off points and the knockout stage

Both competitions split the table the same way. The top eight go straight to the round of 16. Clubs ranked 9th to 24th contest the two-legged knockout phase play-offs, and in principle the higher-ranked sides, 9th to 16th, play the second leg at home. Clubs finishing 25th to 36th are out: there is no second chance and no drop into another competition. From the round of 16 to the semi-finals, ties are also played over two legs, with extra time and penalties if the aggregate score is level. No knockout round keeps clubs from the same country apart. The final is a single match: in 2026/27 the Europa League's is on Wednesday 26 May 2027 in Frankfurt, and the Conference League's on Wednesday 2 June in Istanbul.

The knockout draw has less luck in it than it looks

The knockout phase play-offs, from 9th to 24th place, do not draw 16 clubs freely. The regulations first split them into four seeded pairs (9th with 10th, 11th with 12th, 13th with 14th, 15th with 16th) and four unseeded pairs (17th with 18th, 19th with 20th, 21st with 22nd, 23rd with 24th), and only then draw each seeded pair against one of the unseeded pairs: 9th or 10th gets 23rd or 24th, 11th or 12th gets 21st or 22nd, 13th or 14th gets 19th or 20th, 15th or 16th gets 17th or 18th. The effect is that the weakest seed never falls against the strongest unseeded club: distance in the league phase table becomes distance in the play-off draw.

In the round of 16, the design changes again: the top eight from the league phase form four seeded pairs among themselves (1st with 2nd, 3rd with 4th, 5th with 6th, 7th with 8th), and each is drawn against one of the play-off winners, in a position already fixed by the previous draw. From the quarter-finals onwards there is no more drawing at all: the bracket's structure, meaning who plays the winner of which tie, is already set out in the regulations' Annex B before the play-offs even finish; only the club names are missing. And if a seeded team is knocked out along the way, whoever eliminates it simply inherits its position in the bracket, with no recalculation of home advantage based on the result.

Home advantage in the second leg follows coefficient logic from start to finish: seeded clubs host the second leg in the play-offs and the round of 16, and from the quarter-finals on the criterion switches to the final league phase ranking: whoever finishes 1st to 4th hosts the quarter-final second legs, and 1st and 2nd host the semi-final second legs. Only the final escapes this: it is a single match at a neutral stadium chosen well in advance, but the regulations still reserve one side of the bracket, called the "silver side" in the official text, as the nominal home side for purely administrative purposes, with no real sporting advantage attached.

Unlike the league phase, the knockout stage of the Swiss system, adopted in 2024/25, has no country restriction at all: the regulations for the play-offs and the round of 16 speak only of final-table position, with no mention of association whatsoever. Two clubs from the same country that both survive the league phase can meet as early as the play-offs, in the round of 16, or later, depending purely on where each finishes in the Swiss table, and that is part of the price of swapping closed groups for a single table: the restriction that made sense inside an isolated group of four clubs loses its reason to exist once the league phase has already mixed everyone against every kind of opponent.

How clubs reach the league phase

Most clubs get in through qualifying, and the route differs between the two competitions. In the 2026/27 Europa League, 12 clubs qualified directly through their league or national cup, and one place went to the Conference League winners. Another 12 came through the qualifying play-offs, and 11 dropped in from Champions League qualifying: 4 beaten in the third round and 7 in the play-offs. In the Conference League nobody went straight in: the 36 were 24 play-off winners and 12 clubs beaten in the Europa League play-offs. Clubs beaten in qualifying drop into a competition below: from the Champions League into the Europa League, or straight into the Conference League if they lose in the first qualifying round, and from the Europa League into the Conference League. UEFA itself describes this as being parachuted down. And the round at which each club enters depends on its country's UEFA coefficient: for 2026/27, it was the coefficient covering 2020/21 to 2024/25.

The cap on how many clubs each association gets

How many clubs each country enters, and at what stage, is not the country's choice: it is a direct result of that country's association coefficient, the same five-season ruler (2020/21 to 2024/25, for 2026/27) that decides the overall ranking. The regulations are explicit: these rankings determine the stage at which each club enters the competition. In practice, the higher a country ranks, the more clubs it enters and the later they join, straight into the league phase or close to it; countries at the bottom of the list send a single club, entering at the earliest qualifying round of the European calendar, in July.

The base formula, set out in the regulations themselves, is simple: one guaranteed place for the domestic cup winner, and a second for the best-placed league club that has not gone to the Champions League. That is the minimum template. It gets adjusted through Annex A of the regulations, published by circular letter at the start of each season, whenever a country has more clubs qualifying through other routes (dropping from the Champions League, the previous season's Conference League winners) than those two base places can hold, and the knock-on effect shifts every club one place down the access ladder.

The picture changes season to season, but the pattern shows up in a single snapshot: in the 2026/27 Europa League, England and France each entered the league phase with three clubs (Bournemouth, Crystal Palace and Sunderland; Lyon, Marseille and Rennes), ten countries entered with two clubs each, among them Germany, Spain, Italy and Portugal, and the remaining ten with just one. Nothing in the letter of the regulations fixes a maximum number per country: there is a queue ordered by coefficient, and each country's ceiling is wherever that queue leaves it.

The exact path of a club dropping out of the Champions League

Dropping out of the Champions League is not a single slide: the regulations split Champions League qualifying into two paths, the Champions Path (for clubs that get there by winning their domestic league) and the League Path (for clubs that get there by another league finish), and each one lands in a different place in the Europa League and the Conference League.

A club eliminated from the Champions Path goes like this: knocked out in the first qualifying round, it enters the Conference League's second qualifying round directly, skipping the Europa League entirely; knocked out in the second round, it enters the Europa League's third qualifying round, and if eliminated there, drops to the Conference League play-offs; knocked out in the third round, it enters the Europa League play-offs, and if eliminated there, drops to the Conference League phase directly; knocked out in the Champions League play-offs, it enters the Europa League league phase directly, with no stop in between.

A club eliminated from the League Path, on the other hand, follows a different table: knocked out in the second qualifying round, it enters the Europa League's third qualifying round, and if eliminated there, drops to the Conference League play-offs; knocked out in the third round or in the play-offs, it enters the Europa League league phase directly. The key difference between the two paths shows up exactly at that point: the League Path gathers clubs that qualify by league position rather than by title, usually from higher-coefficient leagues, and losing in the third round is already worth a direct Europa League league-phase place; the Champions Path gathers domestic champions from lower-coefficient leagues, and the same elimination stage is worth only the play-offs.

The Conference League also has an entry route of its own, unrelated to the Champions League: a club eliminated from the Europa League's first qualifying round, the one filled by direct access through the country's coefficient rather than by any drop-down, falls to the Conference League's second qualifying round, and one eliminated from the Europa League's second round falls to the third. It is the same parachute logic, one rung further down.

The league phase draw and its restrictions

The league phase pots do not use the country's coefficient: they use the club coefficient, worked out club by club under Annex D of the regulations, and that is where a common misreading creeps in. A club can come from a country ranked poorly overall and still land in a top pot if its own recent European run has been strong enough, because the draw looks at the club's history, not the country's.

The main restriction on the draw is the same in both competitions, in the regulations' own words: in principle, teams from the same association cannot be drawn against each other, and each team may play against a maximum of 2 opponents from any other single association. That means 2 English clubs, for example, do not meet in the league phase, barring a mathematical deadlock in the draw, and no club faces 3 or more Spanish, French or any other single country's clubs in the same edition.

"In principle" is not a throwaway phrase or an empty promise: the regulations themselves authorise the UEFA administration to adjust the draw's conditions to avoid mathematical deadlocks, which happens when the number of clubs from one association in the pots is too large to respect the restriction in every single pairing at once. In those rare cases, the exception is decided before the draw, not during it.

A country's coefficient and a club's coefficient are not the same sum

The two names sound like the same idea in different clothes, and they are not: a country's coefficient, which UEFA calls the association coefficient, is the average number of points earned by that country's clubs across the three European competitions in a season, divided by the number of clubs the country sent into that edition; a club's coefficient is the sum of the points the club itself earned, season by season. A country can send five modest clubs and still rank high if all five score consistently; a single club ranks high purely on its own record.

And the two use different time windows, not the same one: the country coefficient that sets access for 2026/27 is the sum of five seasons ending in 2024/25 (2020/21 to 2024/25); the club coefficient that sets the draw pots for that same 2026/27 edition uses five seasons ending in 2025/26 (2021/22 to 2025/26), one year more recent. In practice, a club that had a strong 2025/26 campaign already carries that result into its own coefficient for the September 2026 draw, while its country's coefficient for the 2026/27 places was already locked in before that campaign even finished, and will only show up the following season.

There is also a safeguard the regulations call a floor: a club's five-season coefficient cannot be lower than 20% of its own association's five-season coefficient, and whichever of the two is higher applies. In other words, a club's coefficient is never just what it did on its own: it is the higher of the sum of its own campaigns and a floor set at one-fifth of its country's coefficient. The rule protects a club with no recent European history, a domestic champion making its continental debut, for instance, from landing in the weakest pot purely for lack of accumulated points, while also lifting the coefficient of clubs from strong countries that, on their own, would have little to show for it.

What the titles are worth

The Europa League winners earn a place in the following season's Champions League league phase even if they have not qualified through their domestic league. If they already have a place through their league, the one won with the title passes to another club: in 2026/27 Aston Villa had already qualified, and the extra place went to Sporting CP. The winners also play the UEFA Super Cup against the Champions League holders, and the 2026 edition was Paris Saint-Germain v Aston Villa, on 12 August in Salzburg. The Conference League winners earn a place in the Europa League league phase and, if they also qualify for the Champions League through their domestic league, choose which of the two to play in. In 2026/27, every round reached from the round of 16 onwards is worth extra coefficient points, which also count for the country: 1 in the Europa League and 0.5 in the Conference League.

Then there is the money, which adds up round by round. The table shows the fixed amounts for 2026/27 set out in UEFA's circular of 13 July 2026; the governing body itself treats them as estimates subject to confirmation. Two amounts that vary from club to club are left out: the ranking bonus paid in shares, from 1 share for 36th place to 36 for 1st, and the value pillar.

Where the money comes from, and how it is split

The table of fixed amounts is not the whole pie: it is the predictable slice of a three-pillar system UEFA uses across its three club competitions, in different proportions for each. Of the net revenue available to participating clubs, the Europa League sets aside 27.5% for the equal starting fee, 37.5% for performance bonuses (wins, draws, stage reached) and 35% for the so-called value pillar. The Conference League sets aside 40%, 40% and 20%, in the same order: less dependent on the value pillar, more evenly split among the 36 clubs.

That difference in proportions is not an accident, and it is where the Conference League lives up to the job UEFA gave it in 2021/22: making European competitions more inclusive. The value pillar weighs a club's domestic TV market and its own coefficient, so it rewards clubs that are already big; giving it less weight in the Conference League, and more to the equal starting fee, hands a relatively bigger slice to a small-market club making its first appearance than the same club would get under the Europa League's proportions.

The ranking bonus paid in shares, which the fixed-amounts table leaves out because it varies from club to club, has a known, published share value: 75,000 euros per share in the Europa League, 28,000 in the Conference League, running from 1 share for 36th place in the league phase to 36 shares for 1st. Doing the maths at the top end: the league phase's top-ranked Europa League club pockets 2.7 million euros from that bonus alone, and the Conference League's, just over 1 million, on top of everything already in the fixed-amounts table.

The value pillar is the most complex of the three, and the regulations split it into a European part (73% of the total, from TV market money inside Europe) and a non-European part (27%, from the rest of the world), a ratio fixed by the cycle's own broadcast contracts. Each part is also split into shares, 1 to 36: a share of the European part is worth 217,000 euros in the Europa League and 63,000 in the Conference League; a share of the non-European part, 80,000 and 23,000. A club that topped both parts at once would collect close to 10.7 million euros from the value pillar alone, without counting the starting fee, performance bonuses or the ranking bonus.

All of this comes from UEFA's Circular 48/2026, dated 13 July 2026, the same one behind the fixed-amounts table. It splits a gross ceiling of €4.4 billion between the three club competitions and the Super Cup, of which 74.38% goes to the Champions League, 17.02% to the Europa League and 8.60% to the Conference League, after deducting administrative costs, payments to clubs eliminated in qualifying and a solidarity fund for clubs that got nowhere at all.

What a club earns by falling short of the league phase

A club that fails to reach the league phase of any of the three competitions still earns something, on a single pay scale set by the Conference League's figures regardless of which competition it was trying to reach: a flat 175,000 euros per qualifying round played, plus an elimination payment that rises by round, 150,000 in the first round, 350,000 in the second, 550,000 in the third and 750,000 in the play-offs.

A domestic champion that misses out on all three league phases still gets an extra 260,000 euros on top of those amounts. And there is a separate solidarity fund, paid through the associations to clubs that do not reach the league phase of any of the three competitions: 308 million euros, 7% of everything the three competitions and the Super Cup take in.

From the UEFA Cup to the Europa League

The Europa League began as the UEFA Cup, launched in 1971/72 to replace the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup, a tournament UEFA did not run; the official roll of honour starts there. The final has been a single match at a neutral venue since 1997/98. After the Cup Winners' Cup ended with the 1998/99 edition, the UEFA Cup took in the domestic cup winners, and in 2009/10 it adopted its current name. As of the 2025/26 edition, the most successful club is Sevilla, with seven titles (2006, 2007, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2020 and 2023), followed by Inter, Liverpool, Juventus, Atlético Madrid and Tottenham on three each. The Conference League started in 2021/22 to make UEFA's club competitions more inclusive, in the governing body's words, and produced a different winner in each of its first five editions: Roma, West Ham, Olympiacos, Chelsea and Crystal Palace.

A parenthesis on the trophy itself: the Europa League trophy is the heaviest piece of silverware in UEFA's collection, 15kg of silver, well heavier than the Champions League trophy. The Conference League's, built from scratch for the competition in 2021/22, carries no historical weight at all, but it already has five different owners in five editions, the kind of unpredictability the two older competitions lack.

Three misunderstandings persist. The first is that both titles lead to the Champions League: only the Europa League title does, and the Conference League title leads to the Europa League. The second is the old parachute. Until 2023/24, third-placed teams in the Champions League groups dropped into the Europa League, and those in the Europa League groups into the Conference League. In the league phase, a club that is eliminated is out, and the drop now applies only to clubs beaten in the qualifying rounds. The third concerns away goals. The rule that settled two-legged ties on away goals was abolished by UEFA in June 2021, with effect from the 2021/22 qualifying rounds. In the 2026/27 league phase table, however, away goals scored are still the third tie-breaking criterion.