UEFA rankings: which countries will get a fifth team in the 2024/25 UCL?

After this week’s UCL, UEL and UECL games, we are closer to knowing whether the Premier League will get an extra place next season.

Another week of European club competition has come and gone, meaning we are closer to knowing which countries and leagues will get a fifth place in next season’s “new and improved” Champions League. Here’s how things stand after the latest bout of action in the UCL, Europa League and Europa Conference League.

The Champions League revamp will see 36 teams take part in the competition instead of the current 32. That means the competition will make more money from a greater number of games (189, currently 125), which will see the continent’s ‘top’ teams play each other more often, including in the group stage.

The group stage will be where the main difference lies compared to current format. Instead of teams being drawn into eight groups of four and playing six group games, they will instead take part in eight matches and go into one giant table (that’s going to be a lot of scrolling on your results app of choice), with goal difference the first tie-breaker for teams finishing level on points.

The competition will deploy the ‘Swiss model’, commonly used in chess tournaments, which means not every team in the ‘league’ will play each other.

Instead, the 36 clubs will be divided into four pots of nine, based on UEFA’s five-year club coefficient (basically how each club has performed in European competition in the last five years).

Each team will be drawn to face two clubs from each pot, including their own, which should ensure their eight group-stage matches are of similar difficulty on the whole. As is the case now, two teams from the same country cannot be drawn against other.

From next season