CNN
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The UEFA Champions League – the most prestigious competition in European club football – is undergoing a facelift and promises a completely different look and feel from the new season.

According to UEFA President Aleksander Čeferin, the new format was unanimously approved by the organization’s Executive Committee and provides for qualification “on the basis of sporting performance.”

UEFA hopes that from this season onwards, fans will see more high-quality matches at the start of the competition, with more at stake in each game.

So how will the Champions League work from the 2024/25 season?

The main change is that the group stage will no longer feature 32 teams competing in eight groups of four. Instead, the opening round will be an expanded 36-team stage with teams competing in a single league.

Each team will play eight games against eight different clubs, four at home and four away. The teams each club will face will be selected from four seeded pots (based on rankings), from which two opponents will be drawn from each – with one home game and one away game per pot.

This represents a departure from the previous group stage format, in which teams played the other three teams in their group twice (one home and one away game per opponent).

UEFA wants to enable clubs to compete against a wider range of opponents and believes that the new format will see the top teams “face each other more often and earlier in the competition”.

The top eight teams in the league automatically qualify for the knockout round and the teams ranked 9th to 24th must compete in a home and away play-off to determine who will also advance to the round of 16.

Unlike the current format, there will be no way for teams to qualify for the Europa League, as teams that finish 25th or lower, as well as those that lose their play-off match, will be eliminated.

The winning teams in the play-off round will then face the eight best-placed teams in the first knockout round (round of 16), before moving on to the quarter-finals, semi-finals and a one-off final. The 2025 final will be played at the Allianz Arena in Munich.

As in the old format, teams qualify based on their national performance in the previous season.

Two of the four new teams will qualify from the top two countries in the UEFA coefficient rankings, which are calculated based on the results of all clubs in the three UEFA competitions.

Currently, these clubs come from Italy and Germany, the two leading countries in the coefficient rankings.

A team qualifies by finishing third to the fifth-placed association on the UEFA access list – currently France – while another place is awarded to a domestic champion “by increasing the number of clubs qualifying via the champions route in the competition’s qualifying process from four to five,” UEFA said.

The current method of determining the group stage and the match pairings of each club – consisting of balls in different lots drawn by a number of former football players – will be abandoned following the revision of the group stage format.

According to UEFA, almost 1,000 balls with at least 36 bowls would have been needed on stage for the new league phase, which would have led to an “unbearably lengthy draw”.

For this reason, UEFA has turned to technology to help and speed up the process.

All 36 teams are manually assigned a ball number before a “selected automated software” randomly selects eight opponents from the four pots for each team and also decides whether the games are home or away.

The draw will begin with Pot 1, which will consist of reigning champions Real Madrid and the eight teams with the highest European coefficient, followed by Pots 2, 3 and 4.

UEFA says the use of technology will ensure “absolute randomness” within the guidelines; teams cannot play opponents from their own country and can be drawn against a maximum of two teams from any one country. Match dates and kick-off times will be announced on Saturday 31 August.

The same draw format applies to the Europa League, while the Conference League teams only face six opponents from six different pots.

Will the Europa League and the Conference League be affected?

The Europa League, Europe’s second-tier club competition, will follow the same revised format as the Champions League next season.

The Europa Conference League is renamed the UEFA Conference League. In the league phase, the teams play six matches against six different opponents.

36 teams also take part in both competitions.

The league phase of the Champions League and Europa League takes place between September and January, while the first phase of the Conference League takes place between September and December.

Games will continue to take place during the week (Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday) and each of the three leagues will have its own exclusive game week.