Champions League draw today: Who will PSG, Real Madrid and Barcelona face?

The draw for the league phase of the 2026-27 UEFA Champions League will take place at the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco today (Thursday). The draw is scheduled to begin at 10:00pm Bangladesh time, with European football’s biggest clubs set to discover their opponents for the new season.

The qualifying play-offs concluded last night, completing the 36-team lineup for the league phase. Paris Saint-Germain, the champions in the first two seasons under the new format, will begin their title defence with the aim of completing a hat-trick of Champions League triumphs under manager Luis Enrique.

Since the 2024-25 season, the Champions League has been played under a new 36-team league-phase format instead of the traditional group stage. Each team will face eight different opponents, two from each of the four seeding pots with four matches at home and four away. The opponents and home-away allocation will be determined by the draw software.

How the draw will work

The 36 teams will be divided into four pots according to their UEFA coefficient rankings. Each club will be drawn against two teams from each pot.

First, a team from Pot 1 will be manually selected. Special software will then determine its eight opponents and decide which matches will be played at home and which will be away. The same process will then be followed for teams in Pots 2, 3 and 4.

Clubs from the same country cannot be drawn against each other. In addition, each team can face a maximum of two clubs from any one country.

29 teams qualify directly

A total of 29 teams secured direct qualification for the league phase based on their domestic league performances, while the remaining seven places were filled through the qualifying play-offs.

England will be represented directly by Arsenal, Manchester City, Manchester United, Aston Villa and Liverpool.

Spain’s direct qualifiers are Barcelona, Real Madrid, Villarreal, Atletico Madrid and Real Betis. Italy will have Inter Milan, Napoli, Roma and Como, while Germany will be represented by Bayern Munich, Borussia Dortmund, RB Leipzig and Stuttgart.

France’s Paris Saint-Germain, Lens and Lille have also qualified directly, along with Porto and Sporting CP from Portugal; PSV Eindhoven and Feyenoord from the Netherlands; Club Brugge from Belgium; Galatasaray from Turkey; Shakhtar Donetsk from Ukraine; and Slavia Prague from the Czech Republic.

Seven teams through the play-offs

Sabah of Azerbaijan and Bodo/Glimt of Norway have secured places in the league phase, along with LASK of Austria.

The remaining play-off berths involve AEK Athens or Levski Sofia, Viking or Dinamo Zagreb, Celje or Slovan Bratislava, and Lyon or Fenerbahce.

The final seeding pots based on UEFA coefficient rankings will also be confirmed today. The evening draw will then reveal the eight opponents that PSG, Real Madrid, Barcelona and the other European heavyweights will face in the 2026-27 Champions League league phase.