The UEFA Champions League draw is being made on Tuesday as teams will learn their fate for the league phase of the competition.
Six Premier League team will be in the draw – with Liverpool, Arsenal, Manchester City, Chelsea, Newcastle United and Tottenham all featuring.
There are notable British absentees in Celtic and Rangers, who both suffered humiliating defeats in the qualifying rounds.
Belgian side Club Brugge thumped Rangers 6-0 in the second leg of their tie to win 9-1 on aggregate across the two legs.
Meanwhile, Celtic were eliminated by Kazakhstani side Kairat Almaty on penalties after they could not be separated over 180 minutes of football.
Jose Mourinho will not be managing in the competition after his Fenerbahce side lost 1-0 to Benfica on Wednesday night.
The UEFA Champions League draw is being made on Tuesday as teams will learn their fate for the league phase of the competition
Six Premier League team will be in the draw – with Liverpool, Arsenal, Manchester City, Chelsea, Newcastle United and Tottenham all featuring
The 2025-26 season marks the second campaign that features the revamped league phase – with an expanded draw replacing the old group stage format.
It means 36 teams will play eight different opponents and be ranked in a single-standings league-style table as oppose to separate groups.
The weighted schedule gives each team two opponents drawn from each of the four seeding pots Thursday in Monaco.
Teams are seeded based on their ranking over five seasons of results in UEFA competitions.
The first round of matches begins on September 16 with the final matchday scheduled for January 28, 2026.
The top eight teams in the final standings advance to the round of 16 in March. Teams ranked ninth to 24th go to the round of two-legged knockout playoffs in February.
The final at the Puskas Arena in Budapest is on May 30, with the 2026 World Cup beginning just 12 days later in Mexico City.
Newcomers in the main phase are Bodo Glimt of Norway, Kairat Almaty of Kazakhstan, Pafos of Cyprus and Union Saint-Gilloise of Belgium.
The Champions League will go further north than ever before, with Bodo located inside the Arctic Circle, and further east, to Almaty, near Kazakhstan´s border with China. Pafos, the Russian-owned champion of Cyprus, was created just 11 years ago in a merger of two clubs.
Athletic Bilbao heads the teams returning after a long absence. The emblematic team from Spain´s Basque region last played in the 2014-15 group stage.
