Aston Villa won their first Europa League with a 3–0 final in Istanbul
Aston Villa ended the 2025–26 Europa League as first-time winners, beating SC Freiburg 3–0 at Beşiktaş Stadium in Istanbul. The holders, Tottenham Hotspur, never got the chance to defend their crown: winning it had lifted them into the Champions League, and the new rules did not allow a drop back down once the league phase began.
It was the 55th season of UEFA's second-tier club tournament and the 17th under the Europa League name, which replaced the UEFA Cup. It was also only the second season of the current format, in which a single 36-team league phase took over from the old 32-team groups. Seventy-seven clubs from 41 associations took part. Thirty-two associations had direct entrants, and 9 of the remaining 23 were represented only by sides that had fallen out of Champions League qualifying.
That downward flow shaped the whole competition. Thirty-two clubs knocked out of the Champions League qualifying phase and play-off round were moved across, while Europa League qualifying losers were in turn passed down to the Conference League. A quirk at the top rippled through the access list too: Chelsea, holders of the Conference League, had already secured a Champions League place through their league finish, so Dinamo Zagreb, the highest-ranked club otherwise facing qualifiers, went straight into the league phase, and Finland's cup winners were promoted into the first qualifying round.
Fixtures were normally played on Thursdays, with one exclusive week in which games fell on 24 and 25 September. The league phase draw, held on 29 August 2025, was staged jointly with the Conference League draw, a change from the season before. Clubs were still drawn by hand one at a time, but every opponent and venue was generated by computer in one go and then revealed pot by pot. Every club played a pair of opponents from every pot, hosting one and visiting the other, avoided teams from its own association and faced no more than two from any single country.
Twenty-three associations had clubs in that phase. Five sides, Bologna and Brann among them, were making their debut since the group format arrived, although Villa and Brann had played in UEFA Cup groups long before. For Go Ahead Eagles and Nottingham Forest it was the first time in the group or league phase of any major UEFA competition. Villa's campaign reached its climax on 20 May 2026, when they swept Freiburg aside to claim the trophy for the first time.
Source: 2025–26 UEFA Europa League
