Champions League Pots Explained: Seeding and the Draw
How the four Champions League pots are filled, what they decide in the draw and why seeding matters less now, written for supporters of clubs in England.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished European Football24 min read
- Clubs in the league phase
- 36
- Pots in the draw
- 4 of 9 clubs
- Opponents drawn per club
- 8
- League format introduced
- 2024-25
The Champions League has four pots of nine. The 36 clubs in the league phase are ranked by UEFA club coefficient, a five-season measure of results in Europe, and divided into four pots of nine. The titleholders go to the top of pot one regardless of their ranking. Every club is then drawn two opponents from each pot, its own included, playing one of each pair at home and one away. Eight matches, eight different opponents, one league table of 36. For supporters in England the practical consequence is that a Premier League club in pot one no longer avoids the other giants, and a club in pot four no longer faces three stronger sides and nothing else.
On the last Thursday of August 2025, in the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco, a ball with Liverpool's name inside it was opened on stage and a button was pressed. Within a couple of seconds a screen showed all eight of the Premier League champions' opponents for the autumn, four at Anfield and four away. Nobody drew those eight names out of a bowl. That is how UEFA has run the draw since the 2024-25 season.
The four pots of nine at a glance
The table below sets out what each pot is and how a club arrives in it. The draw held in Monaco in August 2025 is used as the worked example throughout this page because it is complete and on the record, and because six English clubs were in it, the most any association had sent to a single Champions League.
| Pot | Who goes in | English clubs in the August 2025 draw |
|---|---|---|
| Pot 1 | The titleholders, then the eight highest club coefficients | Manchester City, Liverpool, Chelsea |
| Pot 2 | The next nine by coefficient | Arsenal |
| Pot 3 | The next nine by coefficient | Tottenham Hotspur |
| Pot 4 | The nine lowest coefficients | Newcastle United |
- 36Clubs in the draw
- 4Pots
- 9Clubs in each pot
- 8Opponents for each club
Fixed by the competition regulations for the format introduced in 2024-25. The figures describe the draw, not any club's results.
Three things about that table surprise people who learned the draw under the old group stage. Tottenham entered as Europa League winners and received no seeding credit for it. Newcastle, fifth in the Premier League, were in pot four with clubs from Cyprus and Kazakhstan. And Liverpool, champions of England, were in pot one because of their coefficient and for no other reason.
Pots exist for a single purpose, which is to give every club a schedule of roughly comparable difficulty. They do not form groups and they are not divisions. A club never "plays in" pot two. It is listed there for a few minutes on draw night, receives two opponents from each of the four lists, and after that the pots have no further role in the competition. League position takes over.
The pots cannot be confirmed until the last qualifying tie has finished, usually the night before the ceremony. Seven of the 36 places are filled through the summer qualifying rounds, and which clubs come through alters the picture: a qualifier with a strong coefficient pushes every club ranked below it down one place, and the club sitting ninth or eighteenth or twenty-seventh on the list drops a pot. Clubs near those boundaries spend the last week of August watching other people's play-offs.
How the Champions League pots are filled from the coefficient list
A club coefficient is a points total. UEFA awards points for wins, draws and progress through its three club competitions, adds the last five seasons together, and compares the result with a fifth of the club's national association coefficient for the same period. The club keeps whichever figure is higher. That floor matters to English clubs returning to Europe after a long absence, since a fifth of England's association figure is a respectable number on its own. The arithmetic is set out in full in our guide to the UEFA coefficient and how clubs and leagues are ranked.
Once the 36 participants are known, which happens when the last play-off tie finishes in late August, they are sorted by that number. The top eight by coefficient join the holders in pot one. The next nine form pot two. And so on down.
The one exception
The titleholders are placed first in pot one whatever their coefficient. In most seasons this changes nothing, because a club good enough to win the competition has usually been collecting coefficient points for years. It is a safeguard for the rare champion whose five-year record is thin.
If the holders would have been in pot one anyway, no place is freed for anyone else and the pot is simply the nine highest-ranked clubs. Real Madrid in 2024 and Paris Saint-Germain in 2025 both fell into that category.
What domestic champions lost in 2024
Between 2015-16 and 2023-24, pot one of the group-stage draw was reserved for champions. It held the Champions League winners and the title-winners of the highest-ranked leagues, with the Europa League winners added from 2018-19. Leicester City were the English beneficiaries in 2016: a club with almost no European record was placed in pot one, ahead of sides with decades of continental results behind them, because it had won the Premier League. It won its group.
That privilege has gone. Under the league format the pots are coefficient order from top to bottom, with the holders the only exception. Napoli went into the August 2025 draw as champions of Italy and were placed in pot three. Bayer Leverkusen, unbeaten German champions, were in pot two a year earlier. The judgement behind the change is defensible. Protecting a champion mattered when a bad draw could mean a group containing two of the best sides in Europe; when every club meets two pot one opponents anyway, there is nothing left to protect.
The cost falls on clubs like Newcastle and Aston Villa, who qualify through an excellent league season and arrive with a coefficient built on very little. How those clubs get into the competition at all is covered in our guide to how Premier League clubs qualify for Europe.
One club's draw: eight opponents, two from every pot
Take Liverpool's draw from that night in Monaco. They were in pot one, and the software returned this.
| Pot | At Anfield | Away |
|---|---|---|
| Pot 1 | Real Madrid | Inter Milan |
| Pot 2 | Atlético Madrid | Eintracht Frankfurt |
| Pot 3 | PSV Eindhoven | Marseille |
| Pot 4 | Qarabağ | Galatasaray |
Every club's draw has exactly that shape. Two from each pot. One of each pair at home, the other away. Four home matches in all, four away, and no opponent met twice. There is no return fixture, which is the single biggest break from the group stage: Liverpool hosted Real Madrid and did not go to the Bernabéu, and travelled to San Siro without Inter coming to Merseyside.
The inclusion of a club's own pot is the part that catches people out. Under the old system pot one clubs were kept apart from each other until the knockout rounds. Now each of them is guaranteed two meetings with their peers before Christmas. A pot four club, by the same logic, gets two fixtures against sides of its own standing, which is where a newcomer expects to take most of its points.
Each fixture is mirrored. When the software gave Liverpool a home match against Real Madrid it gave Real Madrid an away match at Anfield as one of their two pot one fixtures, and the venue rule held for both: Real's other pot one opponent had to be a home game. Multiply that by 144 matches and the scale of the bookkeeping becomes clear.
Because every pairing is one match and not two, the home and away split matters more than it used to. Drawing Real Madrid at home is a different proposition from drawing them away, and the software assigns the venue at random within the rule that each pot yields one of each. No club can end up with both of its pot one opponents at home.
What the draw produces is a list of opponents and venues only. It carries no dates. Those come later, and the process is described further down.
The restrictions the software has to respect
Pure chance would be simple. The draw is not pure chance, because three kinds of restriction are laid over it.
The first is that clubs from the same national association cannot be drawn against each other in the league phase. Liverpool could not be given Manchester City or Chelsea as their pot one opponents, nor Arsenal from pot two. With six English clubs spread across all four pots, that removed between one and three possible opponents from every pot for each of them.
The second is a cap. No club may be drawn against more than two clubs from any one other association. Liverpool's list above contains two Spanish sides and nobody else twice, which is the limit in action. Without the cap a club could in theory be handed four Spanish opponents, and broadcasters in Spain would be selling the same domestic fixtures back to their own market.
The third is political. UEFA's Executive Committee keeps a list of associations whose clubs and national teams may not be drawn together, and revises it as circumstances change. Clubs from Ukraine and Belarus have been kept apart in recent draws, and Kosovo's representatives have been separated from those of Serbia and of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Russian clubs have been suspended from UEFA competitions since 2022, which removed the longest-standing prohibited pairing from practical relevance.
Why the restrictions bite harder than they look
Each restriction is easy to state. Their interaction is where the difficulty lies. A draw is a sequence of choices, and an early choice that looks harmless can leave a later club with no legal opponent in a particular pot. Mathematicians call it a deadlock. With three English clubs in pot one, for instance, each of them needed two pot one opponents from only six eligible clubs, and each of those six could accept two English opponents at most across their whole list.
The same-association rule, and what happens to it once the knockout rounds begin, has a page of its own: our guide to the country protection rule and whether English clubs can meet.
Why the draw is made by a computer and not from bowls
UEFA has been direct about this. A manual draw for the league phase would require close to a thousand balls and at least 36 bowls on stage, one bowl of possible opponents for every club, and it would last for hours. That alone would have justified some automation. The stronger reason is the deadlock problem described above. A human official drawing balls cannot see four steps ahead; software can check, before it offers any opponent, that the rest of the draw remains completable.
So the ceremony was redesigned around a hybrid.
- A physical ballA guest on stage draws one ball from the bowl for the pot being dealt with and opens it to show the club's name.
- The buttonA second guest presses a button, which starts the software for that club and nobody else.
- Constraints checkedThe software removes every opponent the club may not face and every choice that would leave a later club without a legal fixture.
- Eight opponents chosenIt selects at random from what remains: two clubs from each pot, with one match of each pair at home and one away.
- Shown on screenThe eight names and venues appear in the hall and on the broadcast, and those fixtures are fixed for the opponents as well.
- Next ballThe process repeats until all 36 clubs have been drawn, by which time the later clubs have most of their list already filled.
The sequence UEFA used for the Champions League league-phase draws of August 2024 and August 2025. Pot one clubs are drawn first, then pots two, three and four.
That last step explains why the draw speeds up as it goes. When Liverpool were given Real Madrid at home, Real Madrid acquired Liverpool away at the same instant. By the time the pot four balls are being opened, most of each club's eight fixtures have already been determined by other clubs' draws, and the software is filling in one or two gaps.
The software was built by a specialist sports technology company and reviewed by an external auditor, who also attends the draw. UEFA has said the two elements, the physical balls and the digital selection, are deliberately kept: the balls so that a human hand visibly starts each club's draw, the computer because nothing else can finish it.
In Monaco in 2024 the first of these draws was performed with Gianluigi Buffon opening the balls and Cristiano Ronaldo pressing the button. Whether it made good television is a separate argument, and a fair one. The old draw built tension group by group, with a visible bowl emptying. The new one delivers eight fixtures in the time it takes to read them, thirty-six times in a row, and a viewer following one club has about ten seconds of interest in the whole broadcast.
Why pot one means less than it did
Under the group stage, the pot a club was in decided the quality of its group. A pot one side drew one club from each of pots two, three and four, and met nobody of its own rank. A pot four side drew three clubs ranked above it. The difference between those two schedules was enormous, and whole seasons turned on a single coefficient place.
Run the same comparison now. Every club, from the holders down to the lowest-ranked qualifier, plays two from pot one, two from pot two, two from pot three and two from pot four. The only variation is that a club cannot play itself, so a pot one side faces two of the other eight pot one clubs and a pot four side faces two of the other eight in pot four.
That is a real difference but a small one. Averaged across eight matches, a pot one club's opponents are fractionally weaker on paper than a pot four club's, because the pot four club's list excludes one weak team, itself, and the pot one club's list excludes one strong one.
What seeding now shapes is the spread of the fixture list. It guarantees that nobody is handed eight matches against the top eighteen or eight against the bottom eighteen. The strength of any individual schedule still varies, since "two from pot one" could mean the holders and the runners-up or the eighth and ninth names on the list, and the association restrictions push some clubs toward particular opponents.
There is a second reason the pots have faded. Coefficients measure five years of history, and football clubs change faster than that. Newcastle's pot four place in 2025 said that they had played little European football recently. It said nothing reliable about the side they would put out. Aston Villa were in pot four in 2024 and finished the league phase in the top eight.
The first league table under the format made the point bluntly. Of the nine clubs seeded in pot one for 2024-25, three finished in the top eight: Liverpool, Barcelona and Inter. Real Madrid came eleventh, Paris Saint-Germain fifteenth and Manchester City twenty-second, all of them sent into the play-off round, and RB Leipzig were eliminated with a single win. The top eight included Lille from pot three and Villa from pot four.
From a list of opponents to a fixture list
The draw ends with every club holding eight opponents and eight venues. Dates are produced separately, by different software, and published afterwards. In both 2024 and 2025 the full fixture list appeared on the Saturday, two days after the Champions League draw and one day after the Europa League and Conference League draws had been made.
The delay is deliberate. All three competitions share stadiums, cities, police forces and television schedules, so the calendar cannot be built until all three sets of pairings are known.
The scheduling software works under its own constraints, which are different in kind from the draw's. Among the principles UEFA has published:
- no club plays more than two home matches or two away matches in succession;
- each club has one home and one away match across the first two matchdays, and the same across the last two;
- clubs that share a city are not scheduled at home on the same night, a rule that reaches across the three competitions.
That third principle is the one supporters in London and Manchester feel. Arsenal, Chelsea and Tottenham were all in the 2025-26 league phase, with Crystal Palace in the Conference League, and the Metropolitan Police and Transport for London have an obvious interest in not hosting two European crowds at once. Milan and Inter present a harder version of the same problem, since they share a stadium.
The league phase has eight matchdays, running from September to late January. The first seven are spread across midweek nights, Tuesday and Wednesday in the main, with Thursday added as a third night in the opening week of each season. The eighth is different: all eighteen matches kick off at the same time on one evening, so that no club knows the result it needs before it plays. The reasoning is the same as for the final day of a Premier League season.
Seeding in the knockout rounds comes from the table, not the pots
Once the eighth matchday is finished the pots are irrelevant. The final league table produces the seeding for everything that follows, and it does so with far less left to chance than the old round of 16 draw.
Clubs finishing first to eighth go directly to the round of 16. Those from ninth to twenty-fourth enter a two-legged knockout play-off round. The bottom twelve are eliminated outright, with no drop into the Europa League as there used to be for third-placed group sides.
The bracket is then built from pairs of adjacent positions.
| League-phase finish | Enters at | Paired against |
|---|---|---|
| 1st and 2nd | Round of 16 | Winners of 15th or 16th v 17th or 18th |
| 3rd and 4th | Round of 16 | Winners of 13th or 14th v 19th or 20th |
| 5th and 6th | Round of 16 | Winners of 11th or 12th v 21st or 22nd |
| 7th and 8th | Round of 16 | Winners of 9th or 10th v 23rd or 24th |
| 9th to 16th | Play-off round, seeded | A club from 17th to 24th, as above |
| 17th to 24th | Play-off round, unseeded | A club from 9th to 16th, as above |
Read the top row carefully, because it contains the format's oddest feature. The two best sides in the league phase are not paired with the weakest qualifiers. They meet whoever survives the section containing fifteenth to eighteenth, the middle of the play-off field. The clubs finishing seventh and eighth draw the section containing ninth and tenth, who are their near equals. The reward for finishing higher is real, and it is graded.
What a draw still decides
Draws are still held after the league phase, at UEFA's headquarters in Nyon: one for the play-off round and a second, once those ties are settled, for the round of 16 onwards. They are far smaller than the old one. Each pair of adjacent finishers is split, one to each half of the bracket, so the club finishing fifteenth learns whether it plays seventeenth or eighteenth, and the club finishing first learns which of two round of 16 slots it occupies. Once that is done the route to the final is fixed, as in a tennis tournament, and clubs can see their possible quarter-final and semi-final opponents months ahead.
Because the first and second-placed clubs go to opposite halves, they cannot meet before the final. There is no country protection in any of this. Two English clubs who finish in the wrong pair of positions will meet, and no ball in Nyon can prevent it.
Liverpool learned the limits of top seeding in the format's first season. They finished first in the 2024-25 league phase and were paired with the survivor of the fifteenth-to-eighteenth section, which turned out to be Paris Saint-Germain, the eventual champions. Liverpool went out on penalties at Anfield.
Who gets the second leg at home
Playing the second leg at home is treated as an advantage throughout European football, on the theory that extra time and any penalty shoot-out take place in front of the home crowd. The league format hands that advantage out by league position. How the two legs are added together is explained in our guide to aggregate scores in two-legged ties.
In the play-off round, the seeded clubs, those who finished ninth to sixteenth, host the second leg. In the round of 16 the top eight host the second leg against the play-off winners.
Beyond that the rule has already been revised once. In 2024-25, the first season, the order of legs in the quarter-finals and semi-finals was settled by the draw, so a high league finish bought nothing after the round of 16. Arsenal, third in that league phase, played the first leg of their quarter-final against Real Madrid at home. UEFA changed the regulations for 2025-26 so that the advantage carries further: the club with the better league-phase standing plays the second leg at home in the quarter-finals and semi-finals as well, and a club that eliminates a higher seed takes over that seed's position in the bracket. The effect is that the first four seeding positions carry home advantage in the quarter-finals and the first two in the semi-finals.
That inheritance clause is worth a second look. It means the right belongs to the slot and not to the club that earned it. A side that finished eighteenth and knocked out the league-phase winners would walk into the quarter-finals with the top seed's privileges. It is tidy for the bracket and slightly unjust to everyone who finished between second and seventeenth.
The final is a single match at a neutral venue chosen years ahead. One finalist is designated the home club for administrative purposes such as kit choice and dressing rooms; the designation carries no sporting advantage.
Europa League pots explained, and the Conference League's six
The two junior competitions adopted the league format in the same season, with one of them taking a different shape.
| Feature | Champions League | Europa League | Conference League |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clubs in the league phase | 36 | 36 | 36 |
| Pots | 4 | 4 | 6 |
| Clubs in each pot | 9 | 9 | 6 |
| Opponents from each pot | 2 | 2 | 1 |
| League-phase matches per club | 8 | 8 | 6 |
| League phase ends | January | January | December |
The Europa League draw is the Champions League draw in different colours. Four pots of nine, coefficient order, two opponents from each, four at home and four away. There is one difference at the top: the Europa League has no titleholder to place in pot one, because its winners move up into the Champions League the following season.
The Conference League uses six pots of six, and each club draws one opponent from each pot, its own included. That gives six matches, three at home and three away, finishing before Christmas. Whether the single opponent from a given pot is met at home or away is decided by the software, which balances the venues across the six. Chelsea's league phase in 2024-25, in which they won all six matches, was played under that structure.
The restrictions are common to all three competitions: no opponent from the same association in the league phase and a limit on opponents from any one other association. The knockout structure is common too, with the top eight through directly and ninth to twenty-fourth in a play-off round.
The Europa League and Conference League draws use the same hybrid of a physical ball for each club and software for its opponents, and in both 2024 and 2025 they were held in Monaco on the day after the Champions League ceremony. The wider contrasts between the two senior competitions, from prize money structure to scheduling, are set out in our guide to the Champions League against the Europa League.
The old system: eight groups, champions in pot one
Anyone who followed English clubs in Europe between 2003 and 2024 will remember the previous arrangement, and a good deal of confusion about the present one comes from assuming it still applies.
There were 32 clubs and four pots of eight. One club from each pot went into each of eight groups, A to H. Each group played home and away, six matches per club, and the top two went through to a round of 16.
Pot one was by coefficient until 2014-15. From 2015-16 it was given to the holders and the champions of the leading associations, and from 2018-19 to the Champions League holders, the Europa League holders and the champions of the six highest-ranked leagues. Pots two to four remained in coefficient order.
Clubs from the same association could not share a group. In the round of 16, group winners were seeded and drawn against runners-up, and two further restrictions applied: no club could meet a side from its own group or from its own association. From the quarter-finals the draw was open, with no seeding and no protection, which is how Chelsea and Arsenal came to meet in 2004 and how four English clubs produced a run of domestic quarter-finals and semi-finals in the years that followed.
A group's composition could be brutal or gentle depending on which pot two and pot three clubs came out, and the phrase group of death entered the language for good reason. Third place carried a consolation that no longer exists, a transfer into the Europa League knockout rounds after Christmas. Fourth place meant elimination. Under the league format nobody drops down: a club finishing twenty-fifth or lower is out of Europe for the season.
Those round of 16 restrictions had a curious effect on the probabilities. With sixteen clubs, eight of them seeded, and several pairings forbidden, some ties were far likelier than others, and the likelihoods could be calculated in advance by anyone with a spreadsheet. It also made the manual procedure fragile. For each ball drawn, a computer told the officials which opponents remained eligible and the matching balls were loaded into a bowl by hand. The broader history of how the competition reached that point is in our guide to the European Cup and what changed in 1992.
Heated balls and repeated fixtures: what the procedure allows
Every draw produces the accusation that it was arranged. Some of the suspicion has a documented origin and some of it is arithmetic misread as conspiracy.
The heated and cooled balls story has a named source. In 2016 Sepp Blatter, by then removed from the FIFA presidency, told an Argentine newspaper that he had seen draws in European competition manipulated by chilling certain balls so that the person drawing could identify them by touch. He attributed the practice to club-competition draws under Artemio Franchi, UEFA president from 1973 to 1983, but identified no specific draw. UEFA dismissed the allegation as absurd. No evidence has been produced, and the accusation remains exactly that.
A more useful episode came in December 2021, and it shows what a failure actually looks like. During the round of 16 draw, Manchester United were drawn against Villarreal, a club from their own group and therefore ineligible. The ball was put aside, but in the next step United's ball was wrongly left out of the bowl of possible opponents for Atlético Madrid. UEFA blamed a fault in the external software that told officials which clubs were eligible, declared the whole draw void and ran it again three hours later. An arranged draw does not usually need to be done twice on live television.
Why the same ties keep coming round
Manchester City and Real Madrid met in the knockout rounds in five consecutive seasons from 2021-22: two semi-finals, a quarter-final, a play-off tie and a round of 16. That looks suspicious until the mechanism is examined.
Under the old format the pool was small to begin with. Sixteen clubs reach the last sixteen, the same eight or ten of them do so almost every year, and the restrictions cut the available pairings further. Repeats were close to inevitable.
Under the league format the draw has even less freedom. In 2024-25 Real Madrid finished eleventh in the league phase and City twenty-second, positions the bracket pairs together, so the draw's only contribution was to choose between two possible opponents for each. League position did the rest.
What the published procedure allows, then, is narrow. In the league-phase draw, a human being chooses the order in which clubs are drawn and nothing else. The opponents are selected by audited software under rules printed in the regulations. In the knockout draw, each ball decides between two outcomes. Anyone wanting to fix a tie would find there is very little left to tamper with, which may be the least romantic thing about the new system and the strongest argument for it.
More on English clubs in continental competition can be found on the England hub and in our wider football coverage.