PSG won their first Champions League with a record 5–0 final
The 2024–25 Champions League tore up its familiar groups of four for a single 36-team league table. It ended with the most lopsided final in the competition's history: Luis Enrique's Paris Saint-Germain beat Inter Milan 5–0 in Munich to win the trophy for the first time.
PSG became only the second French winners, after Marseille in 1992–93, and the first club from outside England, Germany, Italy and Spain to lift the trophy since Porto in 2003–04. Holders Real Madrid, chasing a 16th title, had gone out to Arsenal in the quarter-finals.
The new format was the season's big experiment. Instead of eight groups, 36 clubs were ranked in one shared table, each playing eight different opponents: two from each of four seeding pots, one at home and one away. Clubs could not meet teams from their own country and faced at most two from any single country. At the draw in Monaco the clubs were picked by hand, but software then chose each team's eight opponents at random and decided which games were at home. The changes lifted the number of matches outside qualifying from 125 to 189.
UEFA also added European Performance Spots, extra places for the two countries whose clubs earned the most coefficient points in the previous season, and introduced one exclusive week in which Thursday became a Champions League matchday too.
The road still started in midsummer. In all, 81 clubs from 53 national associations took part, with the first qualifying games in early July 2024. Because Real Madrid and Europa League winners Atalanta had already qualified through their leagues, their reserved places were passed to the highest-ranked clubs still in qualifying, sending Shakhtar Donetsk and Benfica straight into the league phase.
Source: 2024–25 UEFA Champions League
