Leagues

Europa League 2026-27 draw: the league phase, now tracked on FootInsights

Published 2026-08-31

The Europa League 2026-27 league phase draw is set, and as of this week the competition is live on FootInsights: all 144 fixtures, the 36-club table and matchday-by-matchday results now sit on our Europa League page. It is the second UEFA competition we cover, and it arrives with a caveat we want to state before anyone asks: for now we are tracking it — fixtures, results, standings — without publishing predictions. This post explains the draw, the calendar, and exactly why the numbers come later.

The format: the Champions League’s problem, one tier down

The league phase uses the same structure we broke down for the Champions League draw: 36 clubs in a single table, each playing eight fixtures — four home, four away — against eight different opponents drawn from the other 35. Nobody plays a balanced schedule, so two clubs on equal points in December will have earned them against different fields. Everything we’ve written about comparing teams across leagues applies here with interest, because the Europa League field stretches from Serie A title contenders to league-phase debutants.

The calendar

After the split opening round, every matchday is a single Thursday, and the final round on 28 January follows the Champions League’s finale by a day — a week in which both league phases resolve at once.

The fixtures worth circling

The draw’s headline act comes immediately: AC Milan vs Benfica on matchday 1 (16 September), two former European champions meeting in the opening round. The same twenty-four hours bring Beşiktaş vs Marseille, Anderlecht vs Lyon, Juventus vs NEC, and an all-Premier-League-flavoured pair of hosts in Sunderland vs AZ and Crystal Palace vs Lech Poznań. Real Sociedad against Bournemouth on 17 September gives the round a La Liga–Premier League bridge as well.

Every one of those fixtures already has its page under the Europa League hub, and results will flow into the table there from matchday 1.

Why there are no predictions yet — and when that changes

This is the part most sites skip, so we won’t. Our Champions League model earned its place by being fitted on three seasons of European results and backtested before a single probability went public. The Europa League field overlaps our existing data much less: a large share of its 36 clubs come from leagues our dataset doesn’t cover domestically, which means their ratings have to be built from European evidence and validated properly.

Until that calibration and backtest are done, publishing probabilities would mean publishing guesses with decimal points. Our rule, here and everywhere on the site, is that a number only appears once we can measure how good it is — and once predictions do go live, every one of them lands in the track record with its model version attached, same as every other competition we price.

So: fixtures, table and results now; probabilities when the model has proven it deserves them. When that switch flips, this blog will say so — and the first thing we publish alongside the numbers will be the backtest that justified them.