2020–21 UEFA Champions League

The 2020–21 UEFA Champions League is the 66th season of Europe’s premier club football tournament organised by UEFA. Bayern Munich are the defending champions. The final will be played at the Atatürk Olympic Stadium in Istanbul, Turkey. A total of 79 teams from 54 of the 55 UEFA member associations participate in the competition.

About 2020–21 UEFA Champions League in brief

Summary 2020–21 UEFA Champions LeagueThe 2020–21 UEFA Champions League is the 66th season of Europe’s premier club football tournament organised by UEFA. Bayern Munich are the defending champions. The final will be played at the Atatürk Olympic Stadium in Istanbul, Turkey. The tournament would originally have started in June 2020 but had been delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe. A total of 79 teams from 54 of the 55 UEFA member associations participate in the competition. The winners of the competition will automatically qualify for the 2021 UEFA Champions League group stage and the 2021 UEFA Super Cup. The draw for the group stage was originally to be held at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Center in Athens, Greece, but UEFA announced on 9 September 2020 that it would be relocated to nearby Nyon, Switzerland. The first qualifying round, third qualifying round and play-off round are divided into Champions Path and League Path. The labels in the parentheses show how each team qualified for the place of its starting round. All qualifying round matches were played as single leg matches, hosted by one of the teams decided by the draw. The following rules are applicable to the competition: Five substitutions from the original group stage would be permitted from the second qualifying round to the third group stage.

The original schedule of the tournament was as planned, as planned before the CO VID-19 Pandemic was due to take place in Europe in 2020. However, as a result of schedule delays to both the 2019–20 and 2020 21 European seasons due to the Pandemic in Europe, the 2020–21 European season started before the conclusion of the 2019 20 European season. The teams are allocated places according to their 2019 UEFA country coefficients, which takes into account their performance in European competitions from 2014–15 to 2018–19. UEFA reserves the right to refuse their admission if UEFA deems the selection procedure not objective, transparent and non-discriminatory, or the team is perceived by the public as qualifying unfairly. UEFA also sent a letter to all member associations that domestic leagues must be completed in full without ending prematurely in order to qualify for European competitions. The deadline for entering the tournament had been postponed until further notice. On 17 June 2020, UEFA announced that associations must enter their teams by 3 August 2020.