AS Roma UEFA Europa League 2025 - 2026

The UEFA Europa League kicks off on 24 September and concludes with the Istanbul final on 20 May 2026.

The UEFA Europa League is a continental football competition for club teams organised by UEFA, and is the second most prestigious tournament after the UEFA Champions League.

The name Europa League replaced the historic UEFA Cup in 2009. Under its former name, the competition had been established by UEFA in 1971, effectively taking the place of the earlier Inter-Cities Fairs Cup (1955–1971), an independent international tournament whose rights UEFA had acquired. Since UEFA had not been involved in organising the Fairs Cup, it does not recognise it de jure as a confederation competition and does not acknowledge any historical or statistical continuity between it and the subsequent UEFA Cup/Europa League. With the introduction of the UEFA Cup, the qualification of individual teams was determined by objective criteria, although initially the previous invitation system of the Fairs Cup was maintained; only from 1980 was access regulated through the UEFA ranking.

The competition is reserved for teams finishing in their respective national leagues immediately below those qualifying for the Champions League.

Since 1999, following the abolition of the Cup Winners’ Cup, it has also incorporated the traditional participants of that competition—namely the winners or, until 2015, the runners-up of the various domestic cups. In 2009, after thirty-eight editions, its format was changed following the abolition of the Intertoto Cup, giving rise to the Europa League, which follows a model more similar to that of the UEFA Champions League.