The final of the 2025/2026 edition is only next weekend, but the next Champions League is practically already defined.
Key details
With the qualification, at the end of Sunday night, of Rome and Como (the only newcomers to the Champions League, for now), 29 of the participants in the league phase of the next edition have already been defined.
Hours earlier, Sporting (with Aston Villa’s fourth place in the Premier League) and Liverpool had also guaranteed a direct place in the million-dollar competition.
The seven remaining participants will come from the qualifying rounds, and will only be known in the last week of August. Even the design of these qualifying rounds has already been practically defined, that is, 80 of the 81 clubs with access to the Champions League are already known — all that remains is to know who the representative (champion) of Albania is.
You can check out all the qualified teams in the gallery below:
Sporting and FC Porto will be the 12th and 14th clubs with the best ranking among the participants in the league phase (they cannot be surpassed by anyone coming from the qualifying rounds), so they will be in pot 2 in the draw on August 27th. The issue of pots, however, is less important now than in the past, since, with the reformulation of the Champions League format, each team always faces two teams from each pot, including the one in which they find themselves.
Read more in Premier League news. and related tags: Sporting, FC Porto.