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A look back at last season
Aston Villa did it in Istanbul. On 20 May 2026, at the Beşiktaş Stadium, Youri Tielemans and Emiliano Buendía scored either side of half-time and Morgan Rogers added a third after the break, and Freiburg never laid a glove on them. A 3-0 win, a first UEFA Europa League title, and Villa’s first major European trophy since they won the old European Cup in 1982. It ended a 30-year wait for any silverware at all.
It should be Villa’s competition to defend. It isn’t. As champions, they qualify automatically for the Champions League, and the format introduced a few years ago doesn’t allow a club to drop back down from the Champions League into the Europa League once the league phase begins. Sevilla hit the same quirk after winning in 2022/23. So the trophy Villa just lifted travels to a different cabinet entirely, and the 2026/27 Europa League kicks off without its own champion in the draw. That single rule tells you more about how this competition works than any table ever could: winning it removes you from it.
So, who’s actually favourite?
Here’s the honest answer: nobody has priced this race yet. As of early August 2026, with qualifying still working through its third round and the play-off round draw not made until 3 August, bookmakers including Bet365 and the major odds trackers had not opened an outright winner market for 2026/27. Squawka and Oddsportal both confirm the same thing: the field is still taking shape, and the market opens once it’s settled.
What does exist, and what UEFA itself uses to seed the competition, is the club coefficient, a running score built from several seasons of European results. It’s not a betting price, but it’s the clearest, most current ranking of who UEFA’s own numbers rate highest among the clubs already confirmed for the league phase:
- Bayer Leverkusen, coefficient 105.000
- Juventus, coefficient 72.250
- AC Milan, coefficient 66.000
- AZ Alkmaar, coefficient 62.875
- Real Sociedad, coefficient 57.000
- Marseille, coefficient 54.000
- Rennes, coefficient 35.000
Leverkusen sit some way clear on that list, largely on the strength of their recent Bundesliga and European pedigree rather than anything to do with this season’s early form. But a coefficient is a memory, not a prediction, and every club below it has spent the summer trying to prove the number wrong. Once the league phase draw lands on 28 August and the first bookmaker prices appear, expect that order to move.
The player to watch: Emiliano Buendía’s redemption arc
Numbers explain part of why Buendía’s final appearance was no surprise to anyone following the competition closely. He finished 2025/26 as the Europa League’s outright leader for assists, six in total, and added four goals of his own on top, a return of ten direct goal involvements across the campaign from a player who wasn’t guaranteed a role of this size only a couple of seasons ago. Buendía arrived at Villa from Norwich City back in 2022 and then lost the best part of a season to a serious knee injury not long after, the kind of setback that ends plenty of careers as first-team regulars rather than restarting them.
That context is what makes the final itself land differently. Scoring in a European final and being named man of the match isn’t just a good afternoon’s work, it’s the clearest possible marker that the recovery held and that the numbers behind it, an assist tally no one else in the competition matched, weren’t a one-off run of form either. If Buendía starts 2026/27 anywhere near that level, in a Champions League squad rather than a Europa League one given Villa’s route into next season, it’s exactly the kind of player whose underlying output is worth tracking match by match rather than noticing only once a highlight reel does the work for you.
Records worth watching in 2026/27
Villa’s coronation came with a structural quirk that’s arguably the most interesting record in the competition, precisely because it isn’t really about form at all. As things stand, no club can defend the Europa League title outright: win it, and automatic Champions League qualification takes you out of next season’s draw entirely. Sevilla discovered the same thing after 2022/23, and Villa now join them as the second champion in a row to be denied a defence by the very success that earned it. Whether UEFA revisits that rule is a separate question, but for now it’s a genuine oddity of the modern format, a trophy that guarantees its holder’s absence from the following year’s competition.
There’s a competition record worth tracking too, and it currently has two names on it rather than one. Freiburg’s run to the final included eleven straight home wins in the Europa League, matching rather than breaking the mark Sevilla had set previously. That leaves the record shared for now, which makes whichever club takes on a similarly long home run in 2026/27, whether that’s Freiburg again or someone else entirely, worth watching for a mark that would then belong to a single club outright.
Then there’s Crystal Palace’s route into this season’s competition, which is harder to find a precedent for than either of the above. Palace were demoted out of last season’s Europa League by a UEFA ownership ruling, dropped into the Conference League instead, and then won that competition outright, which is what brings them back into the Europa League now. Being relegated from a UEFA competition on a technicality and then winning the tournament you were relegated into isn’t a record in the strict sense, since nothing about the format was designed to track it, but it’s about as close as this competition has come to a genuinely unprecedented story arriving through the front door of a season rather than through results on the pitch.
The final that Freiburg almost turned into a fairytale
Villa’s scoreline in Istanbul looked comfortable, but the story of how Freiburg got there was anything but ordinary. Julian Schuster’s side trailed Braga after the first leg of their semi-final and came back to win the tie 4-3 on aggregate, matching a Sevilla record of eleven straight home wins in the competition along the way. It was Freiburg’s first European final in the club’s history, and Schuster, only recently retired as a player himself, became the youngest German manager to take charge of a major European final in 24 years. None of it mattered once Villa led 2-0 at the break. Buendía was named man of the match, and Freiburg’s dream night turned into the heaviest final defeat either club could remember.
The knockout draw threw up its share of chaos elsewhere too. Nottingham Forest, who took Crystal Palace’s place in the competition after a UEFA ownership ruling, somehow reached the semi-finals under their fourth manager of the season, Vítor Pereira, having already burned through Nuno Espírito Santo, Ange Postecoglou and Sean Dyche before Christmas. They fell to the eventual champions in the last four. That’s the thing about a straight knockout hanging off a league phase: form and continuity matter less than who happens to be playing well for six weeks in spring, which is exactly why a coefficient list is a starting point for this piece and not the ending.
A summer of new faces on the touchline
Several of the clubs likely to matter most in 2026/27 changed their head coach before a ball was kicked. AC Milan finished only fifth in Serie A under Massimiliano Allegri last season, missing the Champions League places entirely, and turned to Rúben Amorim, fresh off his sacking at Manchester United, to try to drag them back into contention. Bayer Leverkusen have now had three different managers in the space of a year: Erik ten Hag lasted three matches before Kasper Hjulmand took over, and Hjulmand himself was replaced in the summer by Carles Martínez Novell, who arrived on a two-year deal in July. Real Sociedad sacked Sergio Francisco in mid-December after a home defeat to Girona and have since settled on Pellegrino Matarazzo, previously of Stuttgart and Hoffenheim, to steady things.
Then there’s Crystal Palace, who provide the strangest managerial thread of all. Oliver Glasner, who won them the FA Cup and later the Conference League, left as promised at the end of last season and was replaced by Pierre Sage, fresh off guiding Lens to second place in Ligue 1 and a French Cup win. Sage inherits a club whose European story this year is unlike anything else in the draw.
The strangest route back to Europe’s second tier
Crystal Palace’s Europa League place doesn’t come from where they finished in the Premier League. It comes from a UEFA ruling that went against them. Palace qualified for the 2025/26 Europa League by beating Manchester City to win the FA Cup, only for UEFA to remove them from the competition over multi-club ownership rules tied to owner John Textor’s stake in Lyon, who had also qualified. Palace missed the deadline to fix the ownership structure, lost their appeal at the Court of Arbitration for Sport, and were dropped into the Conference League instead, with Nottingham Forest taking their Europa League spot. Palace responded by winning the Conference League anyway, beating Rayo Vallecano 1-0 in the final, and that title is what returns them to the Europa League this season. It’s the kind of story a table alone could never tell.
The rest of the English contingent is newer to this level than Palace by some distance. Bournemouth finished sixth in the Premier League, their highest finish ever, and qualify for European football for the first time in the club’s history. Sunderland, back in the top flight after promotion, finished seventh and secured Europa League qualification in their first season up. Among the smaller names in the pot sits Torreense, a Portuguese second-tier club who qualified through the domestic cup route and will be playing continental football despite not competing in their own country’s top division, a reminder of how wide this competition’s net is cast compared with the Champions League.
Tracking the race as the qualifying dust settles
None of this needs to be guesswork once the league phase actually starts. If you’re building anything around the Europa League this season, whether that’s a prediction model, a content product, or a betting tool, the data behind every claim above is available through the Sportmonks Football API.
Full coverage of the competition, from the qualifying rounds still being played through to the final in Frankfurt, is mapped out on the coverage page, so you can see exactly what’s tracked before you build anything on top of it. Once the league phase kicks off, the xG Data API breaks down expected goals, xG on target, and set-piece xG for every match, basic access available right after full time and real-time access on the Advanced tier, the kind of detail that would have flagged Freiburg’s away form or Forest’s knockout resilience well before either result actually happened.
For the predictive side, the Predictions API runs machine-learning models across match winner, double chance, total goals and more, updating daily and generating probabilities up to 21 days before kickoff, useful in a competition where two-legged ties swing on a single away goal or a red card. And with so many clubs rebuilding around new managers this summer, the Transfer Rumours API tracks speculative moves with player, destination, likelihood and fee before anything is confirmed, handy for watching how Amorim reshapes Milan or how Sage rebuilds Palace’s front line.
Where this leaves 2026/27
There’s no defending champion in this draw, no bookmaker price yet to argue with, and a genuinely open field once the league phase begins on 16 September. Bayer Leverkusen carry the highest coefficient into the competition, AC Milan and Juventus arrive with new managers and a point to prove after missing out on the Champions League, and Crystal Palace bring the most unusual story of anyone in the pot. That’s what makes a cup competition worth watching rather than just forecasting: the table tells you who’s rated, but it never tells you who’s going to win a penalty shootout in March.
Want to build your own view of the race? Get an API token and start pulling live Europa League data today.
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