Champions League Squad Registration Rules: List A and B
Champions League squad registration rules for English clubs: the 25-man List A, eight locally trained places, List B and the Premier League differences.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished European Football25 min read
- List A maximum
- 25 players
- Locally trained places
- 8
- Association-trained limit
- 4 of the 8
- New registrations before the knockouts
- 3
On 2 September 2025 Liverpool sent UEFA a Champions League squad that did not include Federico Chiesa, an Italian international who was fit, under contract and had scored on the opening night of the Premier League season. Nobody at Anfield had fallen out with him. The squad list simply had no room.
The rules that produced that outcome are short. A club in the Champions League registers a List A of no more than 25 players, and at least two of them must be goalkeepers. Eight of the 25 places are reserved for locally trained players, a category defined by where a player spent his late teens and not by his passport, and a club that cannot fill those eight places does not get to use them for anyone else. Beside List A sits List B, which has no size limit and is open only to young players who have been at the club for at least two unbroken years. Everything an English club has to decide each September follows from those few sentences.
The Champions League squad registration rules at a glance
UEFA's competition regulations deal with squads in a single article on player lists. It is the same in substance across the Champions League, the Europa League and the Conference League, so an English club in any of the three is working to the same template. The national association has a part in it as well: each list is checked and countersigned by the Football Association before UEFA will accept it, because the FA is the body that can confirm a player is registered to the club in the first place.
| Rule | What the regulations require |
|---|---|
| Size of List A | No more than 25 players at any time in the season |
| Goalkeepers | At least two of the players on List A |
| Locally trained places | Eight of the 25 |
| Association-trained limit | No more than four of those eight |
| List B | Unlimited, for qualifying young players only |
| Changes before the knockout rounds | Up to three new List A players |
Only players on one of the two lists can be named on a teamsheet. That is the whole purpose of the exercise. A player who is registered with the club under the FA's rules, eligible in the Premier League and in perfect health cannot set foot on the pitch in Europe unless his name is on the document UEFA holds.
The lists also carry things supporters rarely think about: each player's date of birth, nationality, shirt number and the date he was first registered with the club. That last item is what lets UEFA check a claim that someone is club-trained or qualifies for List B. The name of the head coach goes on as well.
A full List A, then, is made of three kinds of place.
- Open to any player17
- Club-trained or association-trained4
- Club-trained only4
The composition required by UEFA's player-list rules. The middle block can be filled by either kind of locally trained player.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Open to any player | 17 |
| Club-trained or association-trained | 4 |
| Club-trained only | 4 |
Seventeen places are free. Four can be filled by anyone locally trained. The last four can only be filled by a player the club developed itself. For most English clubs in Europe it is that final block which causes the trouble.
The eight locally trained places and how the 25 shrinks
Two definitions sit underneath the quota. A club-trained player is one who was registered with the club for three entire seasons, or for 36 months, between the ages of 15 and 21. The seasons need not be consecutive. An association-trained player meets the same test at another club, or other clubs, belonging to the same national association. The two together make up the category UEFA calls locally trained.
Nationality plays no part. A Spanish midfielder who arrived at an English academy at 16 and stayed until 19 is club-trained for that club for the rest of his career there. An England international who spent his teens in an academy abroad is not locally trained at all. The rule measures where a footballer was educated.
Of the eight reserved places, a maximum of four may go to association-trained players. Put the other way round, a club needs four of its own academy products, of an age that takes them past List B, to use all 25 places.
And if it does not have them? The regulations are blunt: where a club has fewer than eight locally trained players, the maximum number on List A is reduced accordingly. The empty places are not handed to senior signings. They disappear.
| Club-trained players | Association-trained players | Largest possible List A |
|---|---|---|
| 4 | 4 | 25 |
| 2 | 4 | 23 |
| 0 | 4 | 21 |
| 0 | 6 | 21 |
| 0 | 0 | 17 |
The fourth row is the one English clubs most often misjudge in public discussion. A fifth and sixth association-trained player do not count towards the quota, because the limit is four. They can still be registered, but only by taking two of the seventeen free places, so the ceiling stays where it was.
A club whose squad was largely bought, with a handful of English players signed from elsewhere and nobody over 21 from its own academy, is therefore working with 21 names for a competition that can run to seventeen matches. The arithmetic is unforgiving, and it is known a year in advance. That is why the status of a 20-year-old on the fringe of a first team can matter more to a club's European planning than his ability would suggest. Lose him and a List A place goes with him.
What counts as a season
The regulations define an entire season as the period between the first and the last official match of the relevant national championship. A player who joins in October has not completed that season, which is why the alternative of 36 months exists. The upper age limit is generous: the qualifying period runs to the end of the season in which the player turns 21. Three seasons begun at 18 will just do it.
List B: the age cut-off and the two unbroken years
Young players are the pressure valve. List B has no maximum, and anyone on it is fully eligible without using a List A place, which is why a club with a productive academy can carry a deep squad into Europe and a club without one cannot.
Two conditions apply. The first is age. For 2025-26 a List B player had to be born on or after 1 January 2004, and the line moves forward by a year each season. The second is service. Since his fifteenth birthday the player must have been eligible to play for the club for an uninterrupted period of two years. A slightly longer route allows for a loan: three consecutive years at the club with no more than one loan, of no more than a year, to another club in the same association.
Sixteen-year-olds have their own clause. A player of that age may go on List B if he has been registered with the club for the previous two years without a break.
The word that does the damage is uninterrupted. A teenager signed from another academy last summer does not qualify, however young he is. Rio Ngumoha is a clear example of how the rule falls. He joined Liverpool from Chelsea's academy in 2024, and when the lists went in on 2 September 2025 he had just turned 17, with one year at the club behind him. Young enough for List B on age, he could not meet the two-year condition, and so under the rule he needed one of the senior places to play in the competition.
List B has a practical advantage beyond its size. It is not fixed in September. A club can add an eligible player to it at any point in the season, provided the submission reaches UEFA by midnight Central European Time on the day before the match in question. An academy forward who was nowhere near the squad in the autumn can be registered on a Tuesday night in March and play on the Wednesday.
That flexibility explains a familiar sight on English European nights: a bench with two or three teenagers on it whom most supporters have not seen play. They are there partly on merit and partly because they cost nothing in registration terms. For a club whose List A has shrunk to 21 or 22, List B is how a matchday squad gets filled.
One caution. Being on List B this season says nothing about next season. Once a player passes the age line he must either go on List A, where he will normally count as club-trained and help fill the quota, or be left out.
The deadlines: September, February and nothing in between
The summer transfer window in England closed on the evening of 1 September 2025. UEFA's deadline for league-phase lists was midnight Central European Time on 2 September. The gap of about a day is deliberate. Clubs finish their business, then make their choices.
After that the list is closed. A player left off in September cannot be added in October because someone has lost form, or because a manager has changed his mind. A free agent signed in the autumn can be registered with the Premier League if the club has room, but he cannot play in Europe before the new year. The league phase is contested, start to finish, by the players named on that one night.
- Transfer window closesEnglish clubs complete their summer signings and departures on deadline day.
- List A submittedThe squad of up to 25 goes to UEFA, countersigned by the FA, by midnight CET the next day. In 2025-26 that was 2 September.
- League phaseEight matches from September to January on a closed List A. List B can still be added to before any match.
- Knockout registrationA club still in the competition may register up to three new List A players. In 2025-26 the deadline fell in the first week of February.
- Knockout roundsThe amended list stands for the rest of the season, to the final.
The sequence in UEFA's regulations, with the 2025-26 dates as the example. The dates shift slightly each season; the order does not.
The second window in the calendar comes after the league phase ends. A club that has qualified for the knockout rounds may register a maximum of three new eligible players on List A. For 2025-26 the deadline fell at midnight CET in the first week of February 2026, a few days after the winter transfer window had shut.
Three conditions bind those changes. The total may not exceed 25. The locally trained quota still applies to the list as amended. And three means three: a club that buys five players in January has to pick.
Chelsea found that out in 2023. The club signed heavily that winter and could register only three of the arrivals for the Champions League knockout rounds. Enzo Fernández, Mykhailo Mudryk and João Félix were chosen. Benoît Badiashile and Noni Madueke, both of whom had cost large fees, were not, and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang was removed from the list to make room. Three players who had been bought to improve the team could not play in its most important matches of the spring.
So the answer to whether a Champions League squad can be changed in January is yes, by three, and only for a club that is still in. How the domestic windows work is covered in our guide to the Premier League transfer window.
How the UEFA list differs from the Premier League's 25
Both numbers are 25 and both allow seventeen players who are not home-produced. There the resemblance ends, and the differences are the reason a player can be registered at home and missing from the European list in the same week.
| Premier League squad list | UEFA List A and List B | |
|---|---|---|
| Senior limit | 25 | 25 |
| Reserved places | Eight home grown, effectively | Eight locally trained |
| Own-academy requirement | None | Four of the eight must be club-trained |
| Qualifying period | Three seasons at any age up to 21 | Three seasons between 15 and 21 |
| Young players | Any under-21 is outside the 25 | Only those with two unbroken years at the club |
| Changes | In each transfer window | September, then three before the knockouts |
The Premier League's rule says that a club may name no more than seventeen players who are not home grown in a squad of 25. A home grown player is one registered with a club in England or Wales for three seasons, or 36 months, before his 21st birthday or the end of the season in which he turns 21. It makes no difference which club. Eight Englishmen signed from eight other academies satisfy the Premier League completely.
UEFA would count four of them. The other four places need club-trained players, and a side without any is down to 21. That single difference accounts for most of the cases in which an English squad that looks complete in August turns out to be several places short for Europe. The domestic rule is set out in full in our guides to the Premier League homegrown player rule and to Premier League squad sizes.
The treatment of young players is the second gap, and it is subtler. The Premier League excludes every under-21 player from the 25 automatically, wherever he came from. In 2025-26 that meant anyone born on or after 1 January 2004, the very same birthday line UEFA used for List B. But UEFA adds the two-year service test. A 19-year-old bought from abroad in the summer is outside the Premier League's 25 and costs nothing. In Europe he needs a List A place, and he does not count as locally trained either.
Clubs who recruit teenagers in numbers feel this sharply. A squad can be comfortably inside the domestic limit, with half a dozen recent young signings sitting outside the count, and several players over the European one.
There is a geographical wrinkle too. The Premier League counts time at clubs affiliated to either the Football Association or the Football Association of Wales. UEFA's association-trained test looks to the single national association the registering club belongs to. The two are not guaranteed to give the same answer for a player raised at one of the Welsh clubs in the English pyramid.
Players who have already appeared for another club in Europe that season
Until 2018 the January transfer market in Europe had a shadow over it. A player who had appeared in the Champions League group stage for one club could not play in the competition for another that season. Philippe Coutinho's move from Liverpool to Barcelona in January 2018 is the case everybody remembers: one of the most expensive transfers there had been, and the player sat out Barcelona's European campaign because he had already played for Liverpool in the autumn.
UEFA removed the restriction from 2018-19. The announcement came in March 2018, weeks after the Coutinho deal, along with other changes to substitutions and matchday squads.
What the regulations say now starts from a general principle and then cuts two large holes in it. The principle is that a player may not appear in UEFA club competition for more than one club in a season. The first exception: a player fielded in the qualifying rounds or play-offs of any of the three competitions may play for a different club from the league phase onwards. The second: any of the three new players a club registers for the knockout phase may already have played for another club in the league phase, in any of the three competitions.
Between them those exceptions cover almost every real transfer. A player who helps a club through an August play-off and is sold on deadline day can play for the buyer in September. A player who plays six league-phase matches for one club and moves in January can play for the next in the round of 16, so long as he is one of the three.
What is left of the old rule is small. A player cannot represent two clubs within the qualifying rounds, nor two within the league phase, which the calendar makes nearly impossible anyway. Separately, FIFA's rules on player status limit a footballer to playing official matches for two clubs in a season, a point taken up in our explainer on whether a player can turn out for three clubs in one season.
Domestic cups in England still work the old way: one club per competition per season. The contrast is drawn out in our guide to the cup-tied rule.
Goalkeepers: compulsory cover and the injury replacement
A goalkeeper is the one specialist a team cannot improvise, and the regulations treat the position separately at every stage.
At least two of the players on List A must be goalkeepers. That is the minimum, and few clubs stop at it. Most English clubs register three on List A as a matter of course and add a teenager or two on List B, where a young goalkeeper who meets the two-year condition costs no senior place.
The special provision concerns injury. If a club cannot count on at least two of the goalkeepers on its List A because of long-term injury or illness, it may temporarily replace the stricken player and register a new goalkeeper at any time in the season. Long-term has a definition: the absence must be expected to last at least 30 days. UEFA requires medical evidence and can have the player examined by its own appointed doctor. When the original goalkeeper is fit again he can take his place back from his stand-in.
This is the main route by which List A can change outside the two fixed dates, and it reflects a plain fact. An outfield injury weakens a team. A club with one fit goalkeeper is a single collision away from putting a midfielder in goal in a European tie.
The outfield replacement added in 2025-26
For years goalkeepers were the only exception. That changed in September 2025, when UEFA's Executive Committee amended that season's regulations to allow the temporary replacement of a maximum of one outfield player with a long-term injury or illness during the league phase, up to and including matchday six. Reports at the time put the threshold at roughly two months' absence. The stated reason was workload: with eight league-phase matches in place of six, a club that lost a registered player in September was carrying a hole in its list for longer.
Liverpool were among the first to use it, and the case closes the circle from the top of this page. Giovanni Leoni, a teenage defender signed that summer, suffered a serious knee injury on his debut in the Carabao Cup. Liverpool applied to replace him, UEFA agreed, and the player registered in his place was Federico Chiesa.
Whether the outfield provision becomes a permanent feature is for later editions of the regulations to settle. It was introduced as an amendment to one season's rules, and it should be read that way.
Why senior players get left off English squads
Nearly every September a well-known name is missing from an English club's European list, and the explanation is almost always the same sum. The club has more than seventeen senior players who are not locally trained, or it has too few club-trained players to unlock all 25 places, or both.
English clubs are unusually exposed. Premier League squads are built from the international market more than any other league's, and the English players in them have very often been bought from another English club. Such players satisfy the domestic rule and fill only the association-trained half of UEFA's quota. Meanwhile the club's own academy graduates tend to be either too young to need a List A place or already sold. The result is a squad with 28 or 29 credible senior players and a European list with room for 21 or 22.
Tottenham Hotspur's return to the Champions League in 2025-26 showed the pattern. The club could not name a full 25, and Mathys Tel, a forward whose transfer had been made permanent only that summer, was among those omitted. He remained available for every domestic match.
How do clubs decide who misses out? The considerations are not complicated, though managers rarely spell them out.
Injury comes first. A player expected to be out until December is an obvious omission from a league phase that ends in January, since he can be restored as one of the three February additions if the club progresses. Clubs gamble on this every year.
Position comes next. A manager can live without a fifth central defender more easily than without a second left-back, so the cut tends to fall where the squad is deepest.
Then there is the awkward category: the player who is fit and useful but ranks last in a crowded position. Chiesa in 2025 was one of these. Leaving such a player out is a public statement about his standing, and it has ended a few careers at a club more quickly than any conversation would have.
Some clubs make a different choice altogether and omit senior players from the league phase of a lesser competition to manage their workload. Chelsea left Cole Palmer off their Conference League list in the autumn of 2024 for that reason. The quota did not force the decision. It was a judgement that the matches could be won without him.
One judgement is worth stating. The locally trained rule was meant to encourage clubs to develop players. In England its most visible effect has been different: it has put a premium on keeping a few academy graduates on the books as squad members, sometimes for what they add to the list as much as for what they add to the team.
Matchday squads: 23 on the teamsheet and five substitutions
Registration decides who may play in the competition. The teamsheet decides who may play tonight, and it has limits of its own.
- 25Maximum on List A
- 23Players on the teamsheet
- 12Substitutes on the bench
- 5Substitutions in normal time
Limits under UEFA's Champions League regulations and the Laws of the Game as applied in the competition. A sixth substitution becomes available only if a knockout tie goes to extra time.
A club names 23 players for a Champions League match: eleven starters and twelve substitutes. All 23 must be on List A or List B. With a full List A, then, only two senior players are left out on any given night, and with a reduced list of 21 or 22 the bench can only be completed from List B.
The bench has grown in stages. Seven substitutes was the standard for many years. Twelve were first permitted for finals from 2018-19, and the larger bench was later extended to every match. The Premier League, by comparison, allows 20 on the teamsheet, so a manager moving between a Saturday league fixture and a Tuesday European one has three more seats to fill in Europe.
Both figures sit inside limits set by the Laws of the Game. Law 3 leaves the number of named substitutes to each competition, up to a ceiling of fifteen, and UEFA has chosen twelve. The allowance of five substitutions began as a temporary measure in 2020, when the calendar was compressed by the pandemic, and was written into the Laws as a permanent option two years later.
Five substitutions may be made in normal time. They must be made in no more than three stoppages during play, with half-time not counting as one, which stops a manager breaking up the last twenty minutes with five separate interruptions. If a knockout tie goes to extra time, one further substitution is allowed along with one further stoppage in which to make it. The domestic version of the same rule is explained in our guide to Premier League substitution rules.
A registered player who is suspended cannot be named, of course. Suspension and registration interact in a way that has cost at least one club a tie.
The qualifying rounds and play-offs: a deadline for every round
The single September deadline applies only to clubs that start in the league phase. A club that enters earlier faces a different regime: a separate registration for each round it plays.
English clubs once met this routinely. Up to and including 2017-18 the fourth-placed Premier League side had to come through a Champions League play-off in August, as Liverpool did against Hoffenheim in 2017 and Manchester City against Steaua Bucharest the year before. The top four now go straight in. The rule still bites on English clubs every year one competition down, because the Premier League's Conference League entrant begins in the play-off round under regulations that mirror the Champions League's.
For each qualifying round and for the play-offs, List A has to be submitted by a fixed date ahead of the first leg. The 25-player limit and the locally trained quota apply exactly as they do later. Under the regulations as they have stood in recent seasons, a club may then add up to two further eligible players after that deadline, provided it does so by midnight CET on the day before the first leg and the FA confirms they are properly registered. If the list is already full, someone has to come off to make way.
The difficulty is that all of this happens with the transfer window open. In late August a club's squad is still moving. A player bought two days before the first leg can be added. A player bought the morning after it cannot play in the second leg. Managers have gone into the decisive match of a play-off without a signing who had already made his league debut.
Departures cause the opposite problem. A player named on the list for the play-off who is sold before the window shuts has used a place that cannot be refilled for that tie.
Then the slate is wiped. A club that wins its play-off submits an entirely new List A for the league phase by the September deadline, with no obligation to name the players who got it there. And any of those players who has since moved on is free to play for his new club from the league phase, thanks to the exception described earlier.
When a club gets it wrong: forfeits and the precedent cases
Murrayfield, 6 August 2014. Legia Warsaw were leading Celtic 2-0 on the night and 6-1 on aggregate in a Champions League third qualifying round tie, played in Edinburgh because Celtic Park was in use for the Commonwealth Games. With a few minutes left Legia sent on a substitute, the defender Bartosz Bereszyński. It was a routine change in a tie already won.
It cost them the tie. Bereszyński had been carrying a three-match European suspension from the previous season. Legia believed he had served it during the earlier round and the first leg against Celtic. But they had not included him on the squad list submitted for that earlier round, and UEFA held that matches for which a player is not registered cannot count towards a ban. He was therefore still suspended when he ran on. The second leg was declared forfeit and recorded as a 3-0 win for Celtic. That made the aggregate 4-4, and Celtic went through on away goals. The Court of Arbitration for Sport declined to overturn the decision.
The sanction is set out in the UEFA Disciplinary Regulations. A match in which a suspended player takes part is declared forfeit. A match in which a player takes part who is ineligible under the competition's own regulations, which includes one who is not on the list, is declared forfeit at the request of the opposing club. Forfeit means a 3-0 defeat, unless the actual result was already worse than that for the offending side.
Intent does not come into it. Legia gained nothing from a few minutes of a substitute full-back in a match they were winning comfortably, and UEFA's disciplinary bodies did not suggest otherwise. The offence is the participation.
A second case, also involving a Scottish club, shows the other limb of the rule. In 2011 FC Sion of Switzerland beat Celtic in a Europa League play-off using players they had signed while under a registration ban imposed through FIFA. UEFA ruled the players ineligible, awarded both legs to Celtic 3-0 and put Celtic into the group stage in Sion's place.
English clubs have so far avoided a forfeit of this kind in the Champions League, and the reason is unglamorous: club secretaries and football administration staff check and re-check the lists, and the FA checks them again before they go to UEFA. The margin for error is still real. A wrongly recorded registration date can turn a club-trained player into an ordinary one and leave a list a place over the limit. A suspension carried over from two seasons ago can be forgotten. The Legia case is retold in administrative offices every summer for a reason.
Where the locally trained rule came from
The quota is younger than it feels. UEFA adopted it in 2005 and phased it in: four locally trained places in a squad of 25 for 2006-07, six for 2007-08 and the full eight from 2008-09. It has stayed at eight since.
The form of the rule owes a great deal to European law. After the Bosman ruling of 1995, limits on the number of foreign players a club could field were unlawful where they discriminated between citizens of European Union states, a history told in our guide to the Bosman rule in English football. UEFA wanted to protect youth development and could not do it by passport. Defining the quota by where a player trained, with no reference to nationality, was the answer. A French teenager who moves to an English academy at 16 becomes locally trained in England; an English one who moves to Germany at 16 does not.
The European Commission said in 2008 that the rule appeared compatible with the free movement of workers. It took the opposite view of a nationality-based quota, known as "6+5", that FIFA was promoting in the same period.
That design has an awkward consequence, which critics pointed out at the time. A rule that rewards having players in an academy from 15 or 16 gives wealthy clubs a reason to recruit promising teenagers from abroad as early as the regulations on minors allow, so that they qualify. The measure meant to promote home-reared talent can as easily promote early importing.
The Premier League followed with its own home grown rule in 2010-11, borrowing the 25 and the eight but leaving out the club-trained requirement. That omission is the origin of the mismatch that runs through this page. Two bodies set out to encourage the same thing and wrote tests that differ just enough for a player to pass one and fail the other.
Further explainers on the rules English clubs play under, at home and in Europe, are gathered in the football section and on the England guides hub.