Champions League 2026/27 Matchday 1: All 18 Fixtures, and the Five That Matter
The draw at the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco on 27 August gave us 144 matches. Eighteen of them get played this week.
Matchday 1 runs Tuesday 8 to Thursday 10 September, six games a night, and the schedule has been unusually generous. A former European Cup final in Madrid on the opening evening. A repeat of last season's opening fixture at Anfield. Two Istanbul clubs in the same competition for the first time in a generation. And four clubs who have never played a game at this level walking out to the anthem.
The full matchday 1 fixture list
Kick-offs are CET.
| Date | Match | Kick-off |
|---|---|---|
| Tue 8 Sep | AEK Athens vs LASK | 18:45 |
| Tue 8 Sep | Club Brugge vs Aston Villa | 18:45 |
| Tue 8 Sep | Borussia Dortmund vs Villarreal | 21:00 |
| Tue 8 Sep | Porto vs Manchester City | 21:00 |
| Tue 8 Sep | Lille vs Real Betis | 21:00 |
| Tue 8 Sep | Real Madrid vs Inter | 21:00 |
| Wed 9 Sep | Barcelona vs Feyenoord | 18:45 |
| Wed 9 Sep | Stuttgart vs Viking | 18:45 |
| Wed 9 Sep | Liverpool vs Atletico de Madrid | 21:00 |
| Wed 9 Sep | Paris Saint-Germain vs Slovan Bratislava | 21:00 |
| Wed 9 Sep | Sporting CP vs Galatasaray | 21:00 |
| Wed 9 Sep | Napoli vs Arsenal | 21:00 |
| Thu 10 Sep | Fenerbahce vs Roma | 18:45 |
| Thu 10 Sep | PSV Eindhoven vs Shakhtar Donetsk | 18:45 |
| Thu 10 Sep | Como vs Leipzig | 21:00 |
| Thu 10 Sep | Bayern Munchen vs Bodo/Glimt | 21:00 |
| Thu 10 Sep | Manchester United vs Sabah | 21:00 |
| Thu 10 Sep | Slavia Praha vs Lens | 21:00 |
Seven more matchdays follow: 13/14 October, 20/21 October, 3/4 November, 24/25 November, 8/9 December, 19/20 January, and a single closing round on 27 January 2027, when all 18 games kick off simultaneously.
Real Madrid vs Inter: the 20th meeting, and the oldest grudge on the card
These two have met 19 times. Real Madrid have won 10, Inter 7, and only twice have they drawn.
The first one still shapes how Italians talk about the fixture. Vienna, the 1963/64 European Cup final, Inter 3-1, two goals from Sandro Mazzola and one from Aurelio Milani against a Madrid side chasing its sixth title. Helenio Herrera's team took the trophy off them.
Neither side arrives settled. Real Madrid lost 1-0 at Real Betis on matchweek 4 of LaLiga despite a front line of Mbappe, Vinicius Junior and Bellingham, and go into Tuesday with a long absence list including Militao, Mendy, Tchouameni and Rodrygo. Inter come the other way, off a 3-2 comeback win over Napoli at San Siro that Lautaro Martinez settled in the 90th minute after they had been two down.
If you want to see how the shapes actually collide, it helps to build both XIs side by side. The Real Madrid squad page and the Inter Milan lineup builder load the current lists, and you can move players into whichever system you think survives that injury list.
Liverpool vs Atletico, the sequel nobody asked for
The draw gave Liverpool Atletico Madrid at Anfield on matchday 1. It did the same thing last season.
That game, 17 September 2025, was one of the best of the round. Robertson scored in the 4th minute, Salah in the 6th, and Liverpool were two up inside seven minutes. Marcos Llorente scored in first-half stoppage time and again on 81 to level it. Virgil van Dijk headed the winner in the 92nd. Liverpool 3-2, decided after the ninety.
The obvious difference twelve months on: Salah is not in the building. He left Liverpool as a free agent in the summer and signed a two-year deal at Trabzonspor, which means the man who scored the second goal in that game will be watching it. Build the current Liverpool squad and the gap on the right is the first thing you notice.
The holders host Slovan, the beaten finalists go to Naples
PSG are double holders. They beat Arsenal in Budapest on 30 May, 1-1 after extra time, 4-3 on penalties, Havertz scoring early for Arsenal, Dembele equalising from the spot, Gabriel Magalhaes missing the fifth.
Their reward on matchday 1 is Slovan Bratislava at home.
Arsenal, meanwhile, open away at Napoli on the Wednesday, which is a considerably less forgiving way to start a season that ended in a shootout defeat. Two clubs, the same 120 minutes in Budapest, and wildly different first assignments. That is the league phase working exactly as designed, and it is also the reason the format's defenders and its critics have both been right for two years. Both squads, as they stand after the summer, are in the PSG and Arsenal lineup builders.
Four clubs who have never done this
Como, LASK, Sabah and Viking are all in the league phase for the first time in their history.
Sabah's route there is the one worth telling. The Azerbaijani club went to extra time in the playoff against Hapoel Beer-Sheva, won that leg 5-2, and took the tie 6-4 on aggregate. Their reward is Old Trafford on 10 September.
Which is its own story. Manchester United finished 15th in the Premier League in 2024/25, finished third in 2025/26, and are back in this competition for the first time since 2023/24. They have never played the 36-team league phase before. Neither has Sabah. One of those two facts is going to look much stranger than the other in ten years. Set up the United XI and you can see how thin the European experience actually is in that squad.
Como host Leipzig the same night, in Italy's fourth Champions League slot behind Inter, Napoli and Roma.
Two Istanbul clubs, same competition
Galatasaray travel to Sporting CP on the Wednesday. Fenerbahce host Roma on the Thursday, having come through the playoff round to make the field.
Turkish press marked this as the first season since 2001/02 that both clubs are in the Champions League proper at the same time. Twenty-five years is a long wait for a city that has been continuously loud about European football throughout it.
Why the first night counts more than it used to
Under the old group format you could lose your opener and still finish top of a four-team group. The single 36-team table is less forgiving, because the margins between the qualification bands are thin.
Here is what the table does at the end of matchday 8:
| Final position | What happens |
|---|---|
| 1st to 8th | Straight into the round of 16 |
| 9th to 24th | Two-legged knockout playoff for the last 8 spots |
| 25th to 36th | Eliminated, no drop into the Europa League |
Every club plays eight opponents, four at home and four away, drawn two from each of the four pots of nine. Nobody plays the same team twice. So there is no second leg to fix a bad night, and a single home defeat in September can be the difference between eighth and eleventh in January, which is the difference between a winter off and two extra matches against a seeded opponent.
The clubs that handle this well tend to be the ones who treat the eight games as one campaign rather than eight cup ties. We wrote about that habit in more detail in what actually separates Champions League winners, and about the shapes managers reach for in Europe in the football formations guide.
One last thing about the final
It is on 5 June 2027 at the Metropolitano in Madrid, the second Champions League final the stadium has hosted after 2019.
Which puts an odd possibility on the table before a ball has been kicked: Atletico Madrid could reach a final in their own ground. They start by going to Anfield, so let's not get ahead of things. But it is the kind of detail that will be mentioned roughly four hundred times between now and June, and you may as well hear it here first.
