UEFA Europa League 2026/27 (M)

The first final was English, and it was played twice. In 1971/72 the UEFA Cup replaced the old Fairs Cup, and Wolves and Tottenham settled its debut over two legs: 1-2 at Molineux, 1-1 at White Hart Lane. For twenty-six editions the final stayed a two-part affair, until Inter beat Lazio 3-0 at the Parc des Princes in 1998 and the trophy began to be decided in a single night.

In 2009/10 it absorbed the Intertoto Cup and took a new name. Atlético Madrid christened the Europa League with a 2-1 extra-time win over Fulham in Hamburg, and since that debut nine of the seventeen finals have ended in Spanish hands. Spain has fourteen titles in all, and half of them belong to Sevilla.

Seven finals, seven trophies — 2006, 2007, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2020 and 2023 — and not one defeat on the final night: no other club has won it more than three times. Three of those finals came with Unai Emery on the bench. Two of them, 2016 and 2023, came after dropping out of the Champions League in third place in the group, a back door the 2024 reform shut: nobody falls from the Champions League in mid-season any more.

Nottingham Forest were not even meant to be there. The place belonged to FA Cup winners Crystal Palace, but in July 2025 UEFA moved them down to the Conference League for sharing an owner with Lyon, and the Court of Arbitration for Sport upheld the ruling. Forest slipped through the gap, finished 13th in the league phase and kept finding a way: 3-0 at Fenerbahçe in Istanbul, Midtjylland on penalties, Porto in the quarter-finals.

Lyon, by contrast, had done everything right: 21 points, seven wins from eight and top spot ahead of Aston Villa, level on points. It lasted until the round of 16. Celta held them 1-1 at Balaídos and won 2-0 at the Groupama Stadium. On the other side of the bracket, seventh-placed Freiburg turned round a tie against Genk (0-1, then 5-1), beat Celta in both legs (3-0 and 3-1) and got past Braga to reach the first European final in their history.

Villa's road ran through Lille, Bologna and Forest themselves, who won the first leg 1-0 at the City Ground before losing 4-0 at Villa Park. In Istanbul, in front of 37,324, Tielemans, Buendía in first-half stoppage time and Morgan Rogers settled it before the hour. Unai Emery won his fifth Europa League, the first with a club from outside Spain. And Villa, who lifted the European Cup in Rotterdam in 1982 with Peter Withe's goal against Bayern, added a first Europa League to the cabinet.

None of the four semi-finalists is back. Villa step up to the Champions League with the trophy under their arm, and neither Forest, Freiburg nor Braga were among the thirty-six in the draw in Monaco on 28 August. What remains is a line-up full of unfinished business: Benfica have lost three finals in this competition (1983, 2013 and 2014) without ever winning one, Marseille another three (1999, 2004 and 2018), and Leverkusen, winners in 1988, still carry Dublin 2024 — Atalanta's 3-0, a Lookman hat-trick that ended a 51-match unbeaten run.

England arrive with very different stories. Crystal Palace come in as Conference League holders — 1-0 against Rayo Vallecano in Leipzig, Mateta the scorer — and on 15 October they visit Lyon, the club they shared an owner with when UEFA removed them from this very competition. Bournemouth make their European debut. Sunderland play only their second European campaign: the first was the 1973/74 Cup Winners' Cup, which they reached by winning the FA Cup as a Second Division side.

That is exactly Torreense's route. On 24 May, from Portugal's second tier, they beat Sporting 2-1 after extra time at the Jamor to win the Taça, the first club from outside the top flight ever to lift it. They will play their home games at Leiria's Magalhães Pessoa stadium, and on that same 15 October they host Sunderland there.

Nobody picked their eight opponents. The thirty-six were split into four pots by coefficient and each drew two from every pot, one at home and one away, with two limits: no opponent from their own country and no more than two from any single country. The calendar that comes out of it has an odd gap: after matchday one on 16-17 September, which includes Milan-Benfica at San Siro, there are four weeks until matchday two on 15 October. Then it tightens up to 10 December and closes with two rounds in January, the last of them featuring Lyon-Leverkusen.

The bracket that follows is drawn by the table. Ninth to sixteenth are seeded in the play-off on 18 and 25 February and play the second leg at home; the top eight get the same privilege in the round of 16 on 11 and 18 March. Quarter-finals on 8 and 15 April; semi-finals on 29 April and 6 May. First and second go into opposite halves and can only meet in the final.

Even so, finishing top has counted for little: in both single-table editions the leader went out before the semi-finals, Lazio against Bodø/Glimt in 2025 and Lyon in 2026. The final on 26 May returns to the Waldstadion, where in 1980 Eintracht won the second leg against Mönchengladbach with Fred Schaub's 81st-minute goal and took the cup on away goals.