Why Is the Europa League on Thursday? The Schedule Explained
Why the Europa League is on Thursday: how UEFA splits the midweek, the UK kick-off slots, and why English clubs then play the Premier League on Sunday.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished European Football22 min read
- Champions League nights
- Tuesday and Wednesday
- Europa League and Conference League night
- Thursday
- Kick-off slots on a normal night
- 2
- Day of the Europa League final
- Wednesday
A Premier League club that plays away in Europe on a Thursday night will not kick off at home on Saturday. Its fixture moves to Sunday, sometimes to Monday, and the whole of its week is bent around the travel and recovery that follow a Thursday match. Supporters feel it first. The flight home lands in the small hours, and the train tickets bought for Saturday are suddenly useless.
The reason the Europa League is on Thursday is simple. UEFA gives each of its three club competitions its own nights, so they never compete for the same television audience. The Champions League has Tuesday and Wednesday. The Europa League and the Conference League share Thursday. In the UK there are normally two kick-off slots on a Thursday, 5.45pm and 8pm in recent seasons. The day is fixed in UEFA's central calendar and sold to broadcasters as part of the package, and no club can opt out of it.
Why the Europa League is on Thursday: UEFA's three-night midweek
The arrangement is a commercial one before it is a football one. UEFA sells broadcast rights to its club competitions centrally, and a broadcaster pays more for a night that contains only one competition. If the Champions League and the Europa League were played at the same time, the lower competition would lose its audience to the higher one and the higher would lose some of its own.
So the European midweek is divided. Tuesday and Wednesday nights belong to the Champions League, which has the larger audience and therefore needs two nights to show its matches. Thursday is left to the Europa League and, since 2021, the Conference League. Monday and Friday are left to domestic football, and the weekend is protected for the national leagues under UEFA's own rules.
That is the whole of the reason. There is nothing in the Laws of the Game or the history of the competition that requires a Thursday. It is the night that was left once the Champions League had taken two.
Why Thursday rather than Monday
A question that comes up is why UEFA did not give the lower competitions Monday instead. The answer is the weekend. A Monday match follows directly on from Saturday and Sunday league fixtures, which would leave clubs one day between matches for travel and recovery. Thursday leaves four or five days after a weekend fixture and two or three before the next. It is the only midweek night left once Tuesday and Wednesday have been taken that does not compress a club's week from both sides.
The judgement worth making is that the arrangement works better for UEFA than for clubs. A club in the Europa League has its league programme moved more often than a Champions League club, and it gets less money for the inconvenience. That trade-off is what the second tier pays for having a television night of its own. Our guide to the differences between the Champions League and Europa League sets out the rest of the hierarchy.
| Night | Competition | What it means for the following weekend |
|---|---|---|
| Tuesday | Champions League | Saturday fixture usually possible |
| Wednesday | Champions League | Saturday fixture possible, often a later kick-off |
| Thursday | Europa League | League fixture moved to Sunday or Monday |
| Thursday | Conference League | League fixture moved to Sunday or Monday |
| Saturday, late May or June | Champions League final | End of the European season |
The two kick-off slots in UK time, and how matches are split between them
On a normal Thursday there are two kick-off times. In the seasons since the 2024 reform they have been 6.45pm and 9pm in central European time, which is 5.45pm and 8pm in the UK. The UK is always one hour behind, because Britain and the continent change their clocks on the same weekends in March and October.
Earlier formats used slightly different times. Under the old group system the early Europa League slot sat close to 6pm UK time for several seasons, and the Conference League at one stage used an extra afternoon slot to fit all its matches in. Any older fixture list will show kick-offs that do not match the modern pattern, which is why a supporter checking a historic match should not assume the times above applied then.
Why two slots rather than one
There are three reasons for the split, and they pull in different directions.
The first is broadcast. A broadcaster can show two matches live on one night if they kick off at different times, and more than two if it uses several channels or streams. Splitting the night gives UEFA more matches to sell in exclusive or semi-exclusive windows.
The second is geography. Europe spans several time zones. A 9pm central European kick-off in Baku is 11pm or midnight local time, depending on the time of year, which is no time to start a football match. Clubs from the far east of UEFA's territory are therefore given the early slot when they are at home, which is a late-evening kick-off for their own supporters.
The third is separation. Clubs from the same city, or clubs that share a stadium, cannot both be at home at the same time if the police or the stadium operator cannot cope. Putting them in different slots, or in different weeks, is one of the tools UEFA uses to keep them apart. It is covered in more detail below.
- 2Competitions on a Thursday
- 2Kick-off slots on a normal night
- 135Minutes between the two UK slots
- 8Europa League league-phase matchdays
The normal pattern for the Europa League and Conference League since 2024-25. UEFA adjusts kick-off times between formats, and the final matchday of a league phase is played at one time.
The split between slots is not fixed. On most matchdays both are used, with UEFA allocating matches to each according to geography, broadcast demand and the separation rules. On the last matchday of a league phase every match kicks off at the same time, so that no club can play knowing the result it needs, a principle football adopted for final group matches after the 1982 World Cup.
The weeks that break the pattern, and why the final is on a Wednesday
The Thursday rule has exceptions, and they are scheduled rather than accidental.
The league-phase format introduced in 2024-25 created a handful of weeks in which one competition had the midweek almost to itself. In that first season the Champions League's opening matchday ran across Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, and the Europa League then started its league phase the following week with a matchday spread over Wednesday and Thursday. Arsenal's opening Champions League match in Bergamo was played on a Thursday that September for that reason. UEFA used the extra nights to give more matches their own broadcast windows at the start of a larger competition. The exact pattern is set season by season in the calendar, so the specific weeks vary.
The Wednesday final
The Europa League final is played on a Wednesday evening, usually in May, and the Conference League final on another Wednesday. The Champions League final follows on a Saturday. The Europa League has followed that pattern for almost every final since it took its current name, the main exception being the delayed 2020 final in Cologne, played in August under the pandemic schedule.
UEFA has not published a single reason for putting the final on a Wednesday, so this part is interpretation. A Wednesday final has the European football audience to itself, because the Champions League has finished its semi-finals and no other competition plays that night. It is also earlier in the week, which gives the travelling supporters of two clubs more chance to return before the weekend. Thursday would have been the natural day had the competition simply kept its normal night, and the move suggests UEFA values a standalone night more than consistency.
It has one awkward side effect for English supporters. A Wednesday final in Spain, Ireland or eastern Europe means taking time off work in the middle of the week, and the flights that serve the final city are priced accordingly.
What a European Thursday does to the Premier League weekend
The Premier League does not ask a club to play on the Saturday after a Thursday European match. Its fixture moves to Sunday or, when Sunday is not available, to Monday. That is the single biggest consequence of the Europa League day for English football, and it is felt as much by the opposing club and its supporters as by the club in Europe.
The fixture is moved by the Premier League rather than by UEFA. It announces its broadcast selections in batches through the season, and it builds the moves for European clubs into those announcements. During the league phase, the European dates are known in advance and the league can plan around them. In the knockout rounds it cannot, because nobody knows which English clubs will still be in Europe until the previous round is over. Our guide to how Premier League fixtures are made and rearranged explains the wider process the league uses.
How the Sunday slot is chosen
A club playing on Thursday night normally plays on Sunday afternoon or evening. Monday is used when Sunday is full, or when a Thursday match was a long way east, or when the Premier League's broadcast schedule leaves no space. Saturday is avoided.
The other club in the fixture has no say. A club with no European football can find its home match moved from a Saturday afternoon to a Sunday because its opponent played in Europe. That club's supporters lose their weekend plans, and its own recovery schedule is unaffected, which can be a small advantage. The detail of how broadcast picks set the weekend's times is in our guide to Premier League kick-off times and TV picks.
The same pattern runs into the following week. A club that plays on Sunday after a Thursday match may then have a domestic cup tie or a league match the following Wednesday, followed by another European Thursday. The cycle repeats every week through the autumn and most of the spring.
Thursday to Sunday: recovery, travel and the 72-hour question
The hours between kick-offs are easy to work out and less dramatic than the complaints suggest. The difference lies in what fills them.
Thursday at 8pm to Sunday at 2pm is 66 hours. Wednesday at 8pm to Saturday at 3pm is 67. In pure arithmetic a Europa League club on a Sunday is no worse off than a Champions League club playing on a Saturday afternoon after a Wednesday tie. Moving to Monday improves the gap considerably. The gap back from Sunday to the next Thursday is a comfortable four days.
Why the hours mislead
The journey is the difference. An English club playing away in Europe on Thursday night will often not get to bed until the early hours, and for matches far to the east it may arrive home during Friday. A trip to Baku, to the Caucasus or to Kazakhstan adds several hours of flying and a time difference each way. A Champions League club's away journeys are more often to Spain, Germany, Italy and France, which are closer and simpler.
Sports scientists working in football commonly treat roughly 72 hours as the time needed for most players to recover physically from a full match, with muscle damage markers and perceived fatigue taking that long to return to normal. A widely cited 2010 study of a professional club playing twice a week found that running performance held up but injury rates rose sharply compared with weeks containing one match. Long-running UEFA injury research on elite clubs has reported similar patterns around congested periods. The research supports the intuitive point that three days is better than two, but it does not support a precise threshold, and individual players vary a great deal.
Sixty-six hours, with a flight and a disturbed night inside it, is below the 72-hour mark. That is the substance of the complaint. Thursday on its own would be harmless; the damage comes from Thursday followed by Sunday, week after week, with travel added.
When extra time is added
The knockout rounds make the arithmetic worse. A two-legged tie level on aggregate at the end of the second leg goes to thirty minutes of extra time and then penalties, so an 8pm Thursday kick-off can finish well after half past ten in the UK, later still in local time if the match is further east. Players who played 120 minutes need more recovery than those who played 90, and the coach to the airport leaves later. A Premier League fixture on the following Sunday then sits roughly 63 hours after the final whistle. Clubs cannot plan for it, because they do not know until the night whether it will happen.
The practical reply clubs make is to manage the minutes. A player who started on Thursday may start again on Sunday, but a player who played ninety minutes in both is the one the medical staff worry about. Rotation, which a later section covers, is the actual answer to the hours.
Does Thursday cost Premier League points? The evidence and the squad-depth answer
This is the question every manager of a Europa League club is asked in the autumn. The honest answer is that it depends on the squad, and the evidence does not support the stronger claims.
The cases where Europe clearly hurt are well known. Burnley qualified for the Europa League in 2018 and started in the second qualifying round in late July, playing six qualifying matches before their league season had properly settled. They did not reach the group stage and their league form in the opening months was poor. Wolverhampton Wanderers started in July 2019 and reached the quarter-finals of the competition in August 2020, a European season of extraordinary length, though they still finished seventh in the league that year.
The other side of the ledger
Then there are the clubs that played on Thursday all season and did well in both. Chelsea won the Europa League in 2019 and finished third in the league. Manchester United won it in 2017, although their league finish of sixth was partly the product of the manager deciding to prioritise the European route late in the season.
The pattern across those cases is fairly clear. A club with a deep squad, used to European football, absorbs the Thursday-Sunday cycle without great damage. A club that has stretched itself to qualify, with a squad built for one match a week, struggles. Newly qualified clubs from outside the usual top six are the most exposed, because they have the thinnest squads and the most to lose in the league.
The weekly comparison that analysts sometimes produce, setting a club's points after European Thursdays against its points after a free week, tends to show a small dip, but such comparisons rarely account for the quality of the opposition or the fact that a club in Europe plays more of its league matches on Sunday and Monday against opponents who were idle. No single figure answers the question. The judgement that survives the evidence is that Thursday costs a thin squad points and a deep squad very few.
Before the Europa League: when the UEFA Cup was spread across the midweek
Thursday was not always the UEFA Cup's night. In the competition's early decades, ties were scheduled across the midweek, with many first legs and second legs played on Tuesday and Wednesday nights alongside the European Cup and the Cup Winners' Cup. Clubs and associations had more say in the day, and English UEFA Cup ties in the 1970s and 1980s were commonly played on Tuesday and Wednesday nights. Ipswich Town's two-legged final in 1981 and Tottenham's in 1984 were both played on Wednesdays.
What pushed the competition onto one night was the Champions League. After 1992 the top competition expanded steadily, from eight clubs in its group stage to sixteen, then twenty-four and thirty-two, with a television contract built around exclusive nights. Once UEFA committed Tuesday and Wednesday to it, the second competition had to move. The Cup Winners' Cup was merged into the UEFA Cup in 1999, removing one claimant, and through the 2000s the UEFA Cup's matches concentrated on Thursday, although Wednesday was still used for some group matches.
The change of name in 2009
By the time the UEFA Cup became the Europa League in 2009-10, Thursday was its night. The rebranding came with a group stage of 48 clubs, a centralised broadcast deal and an anthem of its own, and part of the purpose was to make the Thursday night a product rather than an afterthought. The competition was given its own identity precisely because it had been given its own night.
| Period | Second competition | Usual match nights |
|---|---|---|
| 1971-72 to the early 1990s | UEFA Cup | Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, varying by tie |
| 1990s to 2009 | UEFA Cup | Increasingly Thursday, with some Wednesday matches |
| 2009-10 to 2023-24 | Europa League | Thursday, groups split between two slots |
| 2021-22 to 2023-24 | Conference League added | Thursday, sharing the night |
| 2024-25 onwards | Both under the league-phase format | Thursday, two slots, a few opening weeks shared |
The clashes that force a change of day or slot
Most weeks, the schedule works because UEFA builds it to. The fixture software that generates the league-phase matches is given constraints, including keeping clubs from the same city apart and avoiding home matches for clubs that share a stadium in the same week. Those constraints are part of why a club's home and away matches do not alternate perfectly.
Two clubs in one city
London is the obvious English case. Several London clubs can be in the Europa League and the Conference League in the same season, and the Metropolitan Police and the stadium operators prefer not to deal with two European home matches at the same time in the same part of the city. The solution is normally to put the matches in different slots or different weeks. Manchester and Merseyside raise the same issue when two of their clubs are in Thursday competitions together.
Clubs that share a ground are a harder problem, and the scheduling rules treat them as a fixed constraint rather than a preference. That has rarely mattered for English clubs but affects several European ones.
Policing and the rare postponement
Occasionally a match cannot go ahead on its Thursday at all. The clearest English example came in September 2022, when Arsenal's home Europa League match against PSV Eindhoven was postponed because police resources in London were committed to the arrangements following the death of Queen Elizabeth II. It was rescheduled to a later Thursday, with the knock-on effect on Arsenal's league programme that a moved European match always produces.
UEFA does not readily move Thursday matches onto Tuesday or Wednesday, because those nights belong to the Champions League. That means most clashes are solved inside Thursday, by changing the slot, or by moving the match to another week, rather than by changing the night.
"Thursday night" as a terrace taunt, and the answer from the winners
"Thursday nights" became a chant before it became a scheduling complaint. Supporters of clubs in the Champions League sang it at clubs that were not, and for several years the full version carried the name of the terrestrial channel that showed Europa League matches in the UK, Channel 5. The point of it was obvious. The Champions League was on Tuesday and Wednesday, the second competition on Thursday, and Thursday was where clubs went when they were not quite good enough.
Tottenham supporters heard it more than most in the early 2010s, when the club was regularly finishing just outside the Champions League places. Liverpool, Everton and Manchester United have all had it sung at them in different seasons.
How the winners answer it
The best reply is a trophy, and English clubs have been giving it. Chelsea won the Europa League in 2013 and 2019. Manchester United won it in 2017 and went straight into the Champions League. Tottenham, the club the chant followed longest, won it in Bilbao in May 2025, ending a long wait for a major trophy, and in doing so qualified for the Champions League despite their league finish. A complete list is in our guide to English Europa League winners.
There is something to the taunt, and something to the reply. The Europa League is the second tier, and Thursday marks it as such. A Europa League trophy is also a major European honour that many larger clubs have never won, and since 2015 it has been the most direct route into the Champions League available to anyone outside the top places. The supporters who sing "Thursday nights" at a club tend to stop when that club is lifting the trophy in May.
How managers handle a Thursday competition: rotation, the bench and choosing a priority
Every manager of a Premier League club in the Europa League rotates in the league phase. The question is how far.
The most common approach is to use the Thursday matches for players outside the regular league side: squad players, young players, a returning injured player who needs minutes. Some of the regulars start, others sit on the bench in case they are needed. In the knockout rounds, as the opposition improves and the prize gets closer, the strongest side comes back.
- Thursday nightThe European match, with a rotated side in the league phase and the strongest side in the knockout rounds.
- OvernightFlight home after the match, often landing in the early hours; players who played most minutes start recovery.
- FridayRecovery session for the Thursday starters, normal training for those who did not play.
- SaturdayLight training and tactical preparation for the league match; travel if the Sunday fixture is away.
- SundayPremier League match, with the Thursday starters assessed on minutes and fatigue before selection.
An illustration of the usual pattern, not a fixed schedule. Long trips east, extra time or a Monday fixture change it.
When a club picks one competition
Some managers have gone further and openly chosen one competition over the other. José Mourinho did so at Manchester United in spring 2017, when it became clear that winning the Europa League was the more likely route into the Champions League than the top four. He rested players for league matches and played his strongest side in Europe, and the bet paid off in Stockholm. Ange Postecoglou made a similar choice at Tottenham in 2024-25. The league season suffered badly, the Europa League was won, and the Champions League place followed.
The registration list sets the limits of rotation
Rotation on a Thursday is bounded by UEFA's squad rules, and this catches out clubs new to Europe. A manager can only pick players registered on the club's UEFA lists. List A carries a maximum of 25 names, with places reserved for players trained in England and at the club, and a Premier League squad built around overseas signings can find that it cannot register everyone it would like to use. List B, for younger players who have been at the club for a qualifying period, has no numerical limit, which is why academy players so often appear in the league phase.
The effect is that the Thursday side is not simply "the players who did not start on Sunday". It is the subset of those players who are registered, fit and not suspended under UEFA's separate disciplinary record. A club with a large Premier League squad but a short List A can end up starting the same few players in both competitions, which is the opposite of what rotation is meant to achieve. Clubs that plan well build their summer recruitment with the UEFA list in mind as well as the domestic one.
Promoted clubs and clubs from outside the usual top six have occasionally done the reverse, prioritising the league because the club's finances depended on staying in the Premier League. That choice is rarely announced, but it is visible in the team sheets.
Two English clubs have played European Thursdays while outside the Premier League altogether. Birmingham City were in the Europa League in 2011-12 after winning the League Cup in the season they were relegated, and Wigan Athletic in 2013-14 after their FA Cup win. Both carried the Thursday-Saturday problem into the Championship, where the EFL had to move their league fixtures around European nights.
What supporters need to know: late returns, Sunday kick-offs and short notice
For a supporter, the Thursday competition changes three things.
The first is the trip itself. Away European matches on a Thursday mean taking at least the Thursday and Friday off work, often more. Flights home from many destinations do not leave until Friday. Charter flights organised through clubs are sometimes available, but they are subject to the club's own arrangements, and independent travel to eastern Europe or Turkey can mean connecting through a hub. UEFA's regulations require host clubs to make an allocation of tickets available to visiting supporters, and English clubs distribute their share to members, usually on a loyalty-points basis. Our guide to away days at English football covers how loyalty systems work at home, and most clubs use a similar model for Europe.
Sunday kick-offs and the domestic fixture list
The second is the weekend. The league match after a European Thursday will be on Sunday or Monday, and supporters with tickets for an away league fixture need to wait until the date is confirmed before booking travel. For the league phase, the dates are usually confirmed weeks in advance. For the knockout rounds, they can be confirmed with only a few weeks' notice, once the draw is made.
The third is the cup schedule. A club in Europe that is also in the FA Cup or the Carabao Cup will play cup ties around the European nights, and replays are no longer available as a cushion. Supporters should expect midweek domestic cup ties on Tuesday or Wednesday in weeks that also have a European Thursday.
None of this is a reason not to go. A European away trip on a Thursday is one of the best experiences an English football supporter can have, and for clubs that do not reach the Champions League it may be the only European football they see for years. It just takes more planning than a Saturday at home. For more on the domestic side of English football, the football section gathers the rest of our coverage.
Why the Conference League is on Thursday too
The Conference League was created in 2021 and given Thursday because there was nowhere else to put it. Tuesday and Wednesday were committed to the Champions League. Monday and Friday were protected for domestic football. The weekend was out of bounds. That left one night, and the Europa League already had it.
Sharing the night has consequences. With up to eighteen Europa League matches and eighteen Conference League matches on a league-phase Thursday, there are more fixtures than two kick-off slots comfortably hold for broadcasters, and the Conference League has at times used extra slots to spread its matches out. The overlap also means two English clubs, one in each competition, can be playing at the same time on the same night.
Six matches rather than eight
The Conference League's league phase has six matchdays rather than eight, which means its clubs play two fewer Thursdays before Christmas. For a Premier League club that is a real saving, because December is when the domestic programme is heaviest. The league phase finishes before Christmas, and the knockout rounds begin in the new year on the same Thursday pattern.
The travel is often harder than in the Europa League. The Conference League draws more heavily on smaller associations in the east and the north of the continent, and an English club may face a trip to Kazakhstan, Armenia or Iceland in the league phase. Those journeys make the Thursday-Sunday cycle harder than the hours suggest, for the same reasons as in the Europa League, and for a club whose league ambitions are its priority they are the strongest argument for treating the Conference League's early rounds as a chance to play its squad rather than its first eleven.