Champions Cup 2026/27 (M)

It was created in 1995 as the Heineken Cup, the year rugby turned professional, and started without English or Scottish clubs: both joined for the second edition. In 1997/98 the English clubs pulled out again, this time over how the tournament was run. The standoff repeated on a bigger scale in 2014: English and French clubs threatened to launch their own competition, ERC disappeared and EPCR was born in its place, with the present name.

Stade Toulousain leads the roll of honour with six titles spread across twenty-eight years — 1996, 2003, 2005, 2010, 2021 and 2024 — ahead of Leinster on four and Saracens and Toulon on three each. In thirty-one finals only clubs from three countries have won, and the map says plenty: France fourteen, England ten, Ireland seven.

This year's Pool D holds twelve of those thirty-one titles: Toulouse's six, Saracens' three, La Rochelle's two and Exeter's from 2020. Connacht and the Lions complete the draw without a single one.

The 2026 final was played outside the tournament's usual borders: San Mamés, Bilbao, on 23 May, in front of 52,327. Bordeaux Bègles beat Leinster 41-19 for a second consecutive title, a year after the first in their history.

The scoreline does not lie about the French club's season. Louis Bielle-Biarrey finished as the competition's top try scorer with ten, and Bordeaux were the side nobody worked out in the knockout rounds. Opposite them, a Leinster team that has not won this cup since 2018 and again fell one game short: four titles in the cabinet, all of them before that date.

The season's leading points scorer did not play in the final: Finn Russell, of Bath, with 81. That edition was played by twenty-four clubs in four pools of six, with the top four in each pool going to the round of sixteen, the fifth-placed dropping into the Challenge Cup and the sixth going home.

The draw put Bordeaux and Leinster in different pools, B and C, so the Bilbao rematch can only happen from the round of sixteen onwards. The champions share a pool with Munster, Racing 92, the Stormers, Gloucester and Bristol, and their first match is on 16 October at 19:00 at Kingsholm, Gloucester's home.

Pool D is the heavyweight one: Stade Toulousain, Saracens, La Rochelle, Exeter, Connacht and the Lions. Pool C puts Leinster with Clermont, Glasgow, Leicester, Sale and Section Paloise. And Pool A pairs England's Northampton and Bath with Stade Français, Montpellier, Cardiff and the Pretoria Bulls.

The tournament's geography is the usual one bar a single absence: eight French clubs, eight English, three Irish, three South African, one Welsh and one Scottish. No Italians. The four rounds are played on 16-18 October, 11-13 December and 8-10 and 15-17 January, with the final on 22 May 2027 at the Parc Olympique Lyonnais.

Each club plays only four pool matches, two at home and two away, against four of the other five in its pool. With that little room, an October defeat still weighs in April: there is no time to recover.

Qualification changes this year. The top four in each pool used to go through; now the top three qualify directly and the remaining four round-of-sixteen places go to the best fourth-placed sides across all four pools. Finishing fourth no longer guarantees anything: you have to be fourth and also among the four best fourths in Europe.

The other change is about scoring. The attacking bonus point no longer asks for four tries; it asks for three tries MORE than the opposition, the Top 14 model. EPCR justified it by saying sides will keep attacking after a fourth try instead of managing the game. The losing bonus is untouched: still losing by seven points or fewer. For predicting, this matters little on the scoreboard and a lot in the table: matches that used to be shut down after twenty minutes now stay open to the end.