UEFA Awards Champions League Final to Munich for 2028

UEFA, the governing body for football in Europe, has announced that Munich, Germany, and Barcelona, Spain, will host the 2028 and 2029 UEFA Champions League finals, respectively, among a host of announcements at a UEFA Executive Committee meeting in Thessaloniki, Greece.

Munich Football Arena (otherwise known as the Allianz Arena) will host the 2028 UEFA Champions League final for a third time, having done so previously in 2012 and 2025, while the city itself will be hosting the final for the sixth time in its history (including when it was previously known as the European Cup). On all five occasions so far, a new winner of the competition has been crowned — Nottingham Forest (1979), Olympique de Marseille (1993), Borussia Dortmund (1997), Chelsea (2012) and Paris Saint-Germain (2025).

In 2029, Barcelona’s Spotify Camp Nou will host its third UEFA Champions League final, following victories for AC Milan in 1989 and Manchester United in 1999. The stadium is currently undergoing the final stages of renovations to become a 105,000-seat venue, and has been chosen over Wembley Stadium in London, England, to host the final.

In addition, Barcelona is now guaranteed to host a major football final just a year before the 2030 FIFA World Cup, which will be hosted by three nations, Spain, Portugal and Morocco.

This year’s UEFA Champions League final was held in Budapest, Hungary. The Wanda Metropolitano, home to Atlético Madrid in the Spanish capital, will host the 2027 UEFA Champions League final next summer. That tournament got underway earlier this month.

In a string of other announcements, UEFA has confirmed that Parc Olympic Lyonnais, Lyon-Décines in France will host the 2028 UEFA Women’s Champions League final, while the 2029 edition will be staged in the National Stadium of Wales, Cardiff.

In addition, the UEFA Europa League is the second-highest tier of continental club football in European competition, featuring teams that were unable to qualify for the UEFA Champions League or who qualified directly through their league positions. The 2028 final will be held in National Arena, Bucharest (Romania), and the 2029 final will be at the Serbia National Stadium in Belgrade.

The tier below that is the UEFA Conference League. Its 2028 final will take place in Juventus Stadium in Turin, Italy, while the 2029 final will be in Puskás Aréna in Budapest, Hungary.

Then there is the UEFA Super Cup, one-off matches between the previous season’s UEFA Champions League and UEFA Europa League winners. The 2027 match will be held at Johan Cruyff Aren in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and the following year it will be at Astana Arena in Kazakhstan.

Beyond that, the 2027 UEFA Futsal Champions League will be played at Biel/Bienne Arena, Switzerland. The multipurpose venue in the canton of Bern also hosts football, ice hockey, outdoor ice skating and curling.

UEFA Nations League Updates

The UEFA Executive Committee has also approved adjustments to the promotion/relegation system of the 2026-27 UEFA Nations League, which will transition from four leagues to three from the 2028-29 season after UEFA Euro 2028.

Founded in 2018, the UEFA Nations League was established to replace more meaningless friendly matches with competitive games between teams of similar caliber. It is held every two years, in years when neither the FIFA World Cup nor the European Championships are scheduled.

Between Leagues A to D (with A being the highest level), European national teams have been playing the teams in their leagues on a home-and-away basis to secure promotion to the next tier up or avoid relegation to the tier below. The four teams that finish top of the leagues in League A progress to a small knockout competition the following summer, and the winner of the final is crowned the winner of the UEFA Nations League.

The lowest level, League C, will now include one group of seven teams. It will continue with its current format of quarter finals, final four and promotion/relegation play-offs with no changes.

Qualification Changes for Major Tournaments

The European Qualifiers, which provide direct and play-off qualification spots for future editions of both the FIFA World Cup and European Championships, will now also revert from group formats to a tiered structure, as is currently seen in the UEFA Champions League for club football.

This means that League 1 (the top tier) of the European Qualifiers will be composed of the 36 teams that make up Leagues A and B of the UEFA Nations League, while League 2 (the lower tier) will feature 18 or 19 UEFA Nations League teams.

In League 1, three groups of 12 teams will be drawn from three pots of 12 teams, and each team will play six home and away matches against six different opponents. League 2 will be staged in the same way as UEFA Nations League C, with three groups of six (or one with seven).

The qualification system for major tournaments has been changed to create more jeopardy and excitement for fans, and to reduce the number of matches between teams of very different ability levels.

The next meeting of the UEFA Executive Committee will be held in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on December 7, the day after the UEFA EURO 2028 qualifying draw in the same city.