Dubai: The draw for the Uefa Champions League group stage will take place at Uefa’s headquarters in Monaco from 8pm UAE time on Thursday.
Thirty-two teams will be put into four pots with one team from each pot going into each of the eight groups.
Pot one consists of holders Real Madrid and winners of the top-seven ranked nations at the end of the 2014/15 season: Barcelona, Leicester City, Bayern Munich, Juventus, Benfica, Paris Saint Germain and CSKA Moscow.
Pots 2-4 are decided by each side’s Uefa club coefficient — a statistic system used to rank and seed teams based on their results at the end of last season.
At the time of print, pot two consists of Atletico Madrid, Borussia Dortmund, Arsenal, Sevilla, Napoli and Bayern Leverkusen.
Pot three comprises of Tottenham Hotspur, Dynamo Kiev, Lyon, PSV Eindhoven, Sporting Lisbon and Club Brugge; and pot four has Monaco, Besiktas, Legia Warsaw and Ludogorets Razgrad.
Placing the remaining sides like Celtic and Basel plus six other qualifiers will be confirmed after Wednesday night’s final round of play-offs.
Clubs from the same country cannot be drawn against each other in the same group, while Russian and Ukrainian sides also can’t be drawn against each other due to the ongoing political unrest between the two countries.
The group stage starts on September 13 and runs for six games until December 7. Knockout rounds will be held from February 14 to May 10, with the final to be held at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff, Wales, on June 3.
Defending champions Real Madrid are record holders with 11 wins since 1956. Los Blancos won six titles when it was the old European Cup and have won a further five Champions League titles since the competition’s redesign in 1993. No side has won the title back-to-back in the Champions League era.
