Monaco draw: Juventus draw Real Sociedad, Atalanta draw Ajax

This morning the Sports section of this newspaper covered the US Open, which begins on August 30. This afternoon’s news concerns European club football: on August 28, at 1pm in the Principality of Monaco, the league phase draw for the 2026/27 Europa League took place (Tuttosport).

The two Italian teams entered in the competition, Juventus and Milan, were placed in the top seeding pot. Among Juventus’s eight opponents, Real Sociedad was drawn. In the Conference League draw, Atalanta will face Ajax. The framework of dates and format is reported by Sky Sport and by Sportmediaset.

How the format works

The league phase involves 36 teams in a single table. Each club plays eight matches, four at home and four away, against eight different opponents, rather than against all the others. One rule excludes matches between teams from the same national federation: none of the Italian teams can therefore meet another Italian team in this phase.

This structure has two practical consequences. The first is that the final standings compare teams that have faced different schedules: the difficulty of the path assigned by the draw weighs directly on final placement, more than it did under the separate-groups format. The second is that every single match carries greater weight: with eight matches instead of six, but with only one overall table, a poor result must be made up for within a narrower margin than in a four-team group.

The calendar is fixed: the first matchday is played on September 16 and 17, 2026, the last on January 28, 2027.

What the draw has not yet produced

The draw assigns the pairings, not the dates of individual matches nor the order of fixtures: these are set later by the organization, which must fit the fixtures around other European competitions and domestic leagues. The available material does not include a detailed schedule for the Italian clubs.

A limitation of the sources consulted should also be noted: of Juventus’s eight opponents, the material available to this newsroom reports only one, Real Sociedad. The complete list of opponents for Juventus and Milan, and of Atalanta’s remaining seven Conference League opponents, is not accessible in verifiable form: this newspaper does not reconstruct it from memory.

A note on the top seeding pot

Placement in the top seeding pot depends on the coefficient accumulated by clubs in European competitions over previous years. Being in the top pot reduces the likelihood of facing teams with the highest coefficient, but with eight opponents drawn from different pots, the advantage is spread thin: the seeding pot protects against some matchups, not against the entire schedule.

The next useful check concerns the publication of the schedule with dates and kick-off times, which will determine how many away matches Italian teams will play far from home in the weeks close to their league commitments.