EHF Champions League 2026/27 (M)

The competition was born in 1956 as the European Champions Cup, run by the International Federation, and became the Champions League in 1993/94 when the EHF took over. Seventy editions later it is still the only club tournament that gathers the champions of Spain, Germany, France, Hungary, Poland and Denmark every year.

The club with the most titles is Barcelona, winners across four different decades and again in 2026. Kiel, Veszprém, Kielce, Vardar of Skopje and Magdeburg have all been up there too, and that list says something important: although the favourite is nearly always the same, this trophy changes hands far more often than any national league.

The reason is how it ends. Since 2010 the title has been decided over a single weekend at Cologne's LANXESS arena: two semi-finals on Saturday, the final on Sunday, twenty thousand people and no second leg. It is called the EHF FINAL4, and it has turned a nine-month knockout into a forty-eight-hour lottery — which is exactly what makes it different.

On 14 June 2026, at Cologne's LANXESS arena, Barcelona beat Füchse Berlin 37-34 in the final. Seventy-one goals between them: attack against attack, settled late and not by a defence taking over.

The weekend had opened the day before with two semi-finals of opposite character. Barcelona saw off Aalborg by seven, 37-32; Füchse Berlin and Magdeburg, the two German sides, were separated by one. On the Sunday Magdeburg took third place against Aalborg, 32-26. And to get there, Füchse had knocked Veszprém out in the quarter-finals on penalties: the Hungarian club remains the European giant that has never won it.

That final sums up why this competition is predicted differently from a league: in Cologne there is no room to correct. A team can dominate the whole group stage, win its knockout ties, reach the LANXESS and lose the title in a bad quarter of an hour on Saturday afternoon. The three goals of 2026 are, in fact, a wide margin by the standards of those two days.

2026/27 launches the tournament's biggest reform in twenty years. Until now sixteen clubs played in two groups of eight, fourteen home-and-away rounds from September to March. From this edition twenty-four come in, split into six groups of four.

That changes the rhythm entirely. The group stage is only six rounds and is played in full between 9 September and 29 October: seven weeks to go through or go out, with no time to react. The top two in each group — twelve teams — move on to a main round of two groups of six, and the top four of each play two-legged quarter-finals. Cologne still closes the season in June.

For anyone predicting, the practical consequence is that September and October now matter far more. In the old format a bad start could be repaired across fourteen rounds; in the new one, with six games and groups of four, a home defeat in week one can leave a contender playing for its life on the final matchday.

Twenty-four clubs from sixteen countries, from 9 September to 29 October in the first phase. The four who reached Cologne are there — Barcelona, Füchse Berlin, Magdeburg and Aalborg — and with them Hungary's Veszprém, Poland's Kielce, Melsungen, Paris Saint-Germain, Nantes, Montpellier, Szeged, Slovenia's Celje, Zagreb, Partizan, Vardar of Skopje and Portugal's Sporting.

The expansion also brings in clubs that rarely reached the main stage: Switzerland's Kriens-Lucerne, Norway's Kolstad, Skanderborg Aarhus, Dinamo București, Sweden's Kristianstad, Porto, Wisła Płock and Denmark's GOG. It is the widest field the competition has had, and for anyone predicting it means one concrete thing: many more games between teams that do not know each other, and therefore scorelines less predictable than in a domestic league.

Barcelona defend the title. Füchse Berlin arrive with the awkward label of a finalist who has not yet lifted anything, Magdeburg as a recent champion who fell a goal short of the final, and Veszprém with the heaviest label of all: three decades of near-misses and no trophy.