Conference League – How a Polish Club Gets into Europe and What It Is Worth

Before a Polish club plays a single match in the league phase of the Conference League, the Europa League or the Champions League, it has to get through a multi-stage qualification system in which every round has its own price in euros. This text explains the route itself and the mechanics of the money at every stage – it is not a ranking of bookmakers for the Conference League (you will find that in the guide betting on the Conference League (in Polish)), but an explanation of the structure of the competitions themselves, complementing our most popular text Champions League, Europa League and Conference League – the differences in money and progression. Updated: October 2026. The financial data comes from UEFA’s official distribution cycle for the 2024/25–2026/27 seasons and does not concern the earnings of any particular Polish club – it is solely about how the system itself is built.

Where does all this money come from – the whole pot in brief

Before any euro reaches a specific club, UEFA divides the entire revenue pool of the three cups in several steps. From the gross revenue estimated for 2025/26 (≈€4.4 billion), the organisational costs of the competitions (≈€387m) are deducted first, 3% goes into the pool for payments for the qualifying rounds, and a further 7% feeds the solidarity pool. Of what is left – that is, net revenue, ≈€3.548 billion in the 2025/26 plan – as much as 93.5% goes to the clubs taking part in the competitions, and only 6.5% stays with UEFA. Of this club pool (≈€3.317 billion in the 2025/26 plan) the Champions League takes 74.38%, the Europa League 17.02% and the Conference League 8.60% – a proportion that repeats from season to season in the current 2024–27 cycle; only the exact euro amounts change, along with UEFA’s total revenue.

Where the number of places for Poland comes from

How many clubs from a given country enter the European cups, and from which stage, depends on UEFA’s 5-year country ranking – the sum of the results of all of a country’s clubs in Europe over the last five seasons. The higher in this ranking, the more places and the later (and therefore easier) the starting round for the champion or cup winner. The exact, current number of places allocated to Poland for a given season is described separately in the text Polish clubs in Europe 2026/27 (in Polish) – here we focus on the mechanism itself, which is constant regardless of exactly how many places fall to Poland in a given year. For orientation: in UEFA’s 5-year country ranking (seasons 2021/22–2025/26) Poland currently stands in 12th place with 46.750 points – between Greece (11th, 48.412 pts) and Denmark (13th, 42.106 pts) – which translates into 5 places in the European cups for the 2026/27 season (2 in Champions League qualifying, 1 in the Europa League, 2 in the Conference League). Source: kassiesa.net and rankinguefa.pl – two independent sites that agree on the figures, accessed 31 July 2026; these are figures from third-party sites, not from UEFA’s official website.

Access list – how it works, with an example

The tool UEFA actually uses to allocate places is the so-called access list – a table in which each of the 55 member associations is assigned an exact starting round for its champion, runner-up, national cup winner and so on, separately for the Champions League, the Europa League and the Conference League. An association’s position in this table follows directly from its place in the 5-year country ranking – the higher it is, the later the starting round for its clubs.

Let us trace it through a purely illustrative example, with no reference to any real country or season: suppose that Club A becomes champion of a country whose association sits in the middle of UEFA’s 5-year ranking – say, somewhere around 20th–30th place out of 55. The access list will give such an association an entry for its champion into a fairly early Champions League qualifying round (because Club A is not yet seeded high), with an automatic “parachute” into the Europa League and then into the Conference League after further defeats – exactly the mechanism described below. If the same Club A represented an association from the top five of the ranking, its champion would go straight into the Champions League league phase, with no qualifying at all. The difference between these two scenarios – the same national trophy, a completely different starting point in Europe – comes solely from the country’s position in the access list, not from anything Club A did in its own season.

The access list is set anew every season, on the basis of the updated 5-year country ranking, so an association that improves its results in the European cups for several years in a row may over time “move” its champion into an ever later, easier starting round – and vice versa.

Two different UEFA club rankings – and what each is for

UEFA maintains two separate club rankings at the same time, calculated over different periods and for different purposes. The 5-year “sporting” club ranking decides seeding in the draws and the pot system – it determines how strong the opponents are that a club gets in the league phase. A separate, 10-year “revenue” ranking counts solely towards the non-European part of the value pillar described below – and from the 2024–27 cycle it no longer includes bonus points for historical titles, unlike the previous 2021–24 cycle. Countries, in turn, have their own combined 5-year ranking – it decides how many places and from which round a given country gets, Poland included.

The qualifying ladder step by step – the “parachute” system

The league phase itself does not end with a simple move to the quarter-final either. In the Conference League, as in the Champions League and the Europa League, after the 36-club league phase places 1–8 go straight to the round of 16, while places 9–24 first play an extra play-off round (two legs) before joining the top eight. Clubs in places 25–36 end their European season at the league phase, with no further play.

Clubs that start from the lower qualifying rounds of the Champions League and are knocked out do not end their European adventure straight away – they drop to a lower level, keeping the right to play:

• Losing in the Champions League qualifying rounds (the so-called “league path”) – the club receives €175k for each round played (apart from one specific round named in the regulations) plus the centralised league-phase money of the Europa League.
• Winning the Europa League play-off – the club plays the Europa League league phase and receives its full starting fee.
• Losing the Europa League play-off – the club “drops” one level down and goes into the Conference League league phase, with its full starting fee – this is not merely a consolation bonus but a real place in the next competition.
• Losing the final play-off for the Conference League – this is the lowest point of the whole system: the club receives only the fixed fee for the rounds played plus a one-off bonus for being knocked out, without entering any league phase.

How much a qualifying round itself pays

Regardless of which competition a club finally ends up in, every qualifying round played has a fixed rate – €175k – and on top of that comes a one-off bonus for being knocked out at a given stage:

A club that happens to be the reigning champion of its country and fails to reach any league phase receives an additional one-off bonus of €260k – the only bonus in the whole qualifying system awarded for the status of national champion itself, rather than for the result of a particular match.

What a club gets when it reaches the Conference League league phase

Reaching the league phase proper changes the scale of the money by an order of magnitude compared with qualifying. In the Conference League, 2024–27 cycle (plan for the 2025/26 season), the mechanism looks like this:

The value pillar is split into two parts, paid out according to two different keys. The European part (base share rate ≈€63k) depends on the position of the club’s country in the ranking of domestic broadcasters’ contribution to the common media pool of the given competition, averaged with UEFA’s 5-year coefficient ranking. The non-European part (≈€23k) is calculated solely from UEFA’s 10-year club ranking, with no bonuses for past titles – from the 2024–27 cycle UEFA dropped the points bonuses for historical trophies that still existed in the previous 2021–24 cycle. It is the only element of the whole system in which what counts is not current form or the result of a single match but the club’s long-run history of European appearances.

Solidarity – money even for clubs outside the cups

UEFA’s system does not forget the clubs that will not play any league phase at all in a given season either. From 7% of the total gross revenue of the three UEFA cups (about €308m in the plan for the 2025/26 season) a separate solidarity pool is created, paid out through national associations – it covers both clubs eliminated in qualifying and those that did not even try to play in Europe that season. It is an additional stream of money, though much smaller than the rewards for progression, which shows that the mere participation of Polish clubs in UEFA’s European system – even without reaching any league phase – has a certain financial value for the whole national football community.

Money for progression in the knockout phase

Each successive knockout round of the Conference League that a club wins or advances to adds a separate, rising bonus:

Poland in practice – two confirmed examples from the 2024/25 season

The whole mechanism above is easier to understand with real, confirmed numbers than with the purely illustrative “Club A” from the earlier section. In the 2024/25 season two Polish clubs reached the league phase of the Conference League, and both went as far as the quarter-final: Legia Warszawa and Jagiellonia Białystok. The amounts below come from UEFA’s official, audited distribution table for the 2024/25 season (Financial Report 2024/25, published in January 2026, pp. 36–37) – unlike the planned, averaged rates in the rest of this article, these are the only figures in this text that describe the earnings of a specific, named club.

Neither of the two clubs reached the semi-final or the final, so their totals contain no corresponding items from the knockout bonus table above. The difference between them is about €1.26m, and the largest part of it – about €1.06m, or roughly four fifths – comes from the value pillar, that is, the difference in UEFA’s 10-year club ranking between the two teams. The rest, about €0.2m, is small differences in points for the league phase and in the league-phase ranking. The amounts that depend solely on how far a club went – the starting fee, the round-of-16 bonus and the quarter-final bonus – were identical for both teams, because they reached exactly the same stage. Source: UEFA Financial Report 2024/25, Conference League distribution table.

Lech Poznań and Raków Częstochowa reached the league phase of the Conference League only a season later, in 2025/26 (Raków went out in the round of 16 to ACF Fiorentina in March 2026) – too recently for an audited UEFA table of their earnings from that season to exist. The estimates for that season available in the Polish media are inconsistent with one another (different articles give different amounts for the same stage of the competition), which is why we deliberately do not quote any specific sum for either of these two clubs here.

How this compares with the Europa League and the Champions League

The difference in the league-phase starting fee alone shows why progression “up” the European hierarchy is worth so much more than mere participation in the lowest of the three cups:

The jump between the Conference League and the Europa League is relatively small, whereas between the Europa League and the Champions League it is more than fourfold. The same pattern shows in the bonuses for winning a league-phase match: €400k in the Conference League, €450k in the Europa League, but as much as €2.1m in the Champions League. In other words, it is mainly the Champions League that accounts for most of the financial gulf in the whole system, not the border between the two smaller cups itself. We describe the full comparison of all elements (win bonuses, knockout bonuses, the value pillar) across the three competitions in the text Champions League, Europa League and Conference League – the differences in money and progression, and how this format has changed and where it is heading from the 2027/28 season in the text the future of the European cups 2027.

The UEFA Super Cup – an extra only for the Champions League

Only one of the three UEFA club competitions has its own Super Cup – the Champions League winner plays a single match against the Europa League winner for the UEFA Super Cup, held at the start of the following season. The financial settlement of this match is part of the same total budget pool as the whole Champions League, not a separate pool – another example of how big the financial gulf is between the highest of the three cups and the other two: the Conference League and the Europa League have no comparable extra match in their system.

What this means for bettors

Knowing the structure of the competitions itself – and not only team form – genuinely helps in reading the markets on qualifying ties and play-offs. Since losing a Europa League play-off still means full participation in the Conference League league phase (rather than elimination), the pressure to win the play-off itself is different from that in a typical knockout match of the “win or your season is over” kind – which matters when choosing between a market on the winner of a two-legged tie and the Asian handicap, which we explain in the guide betting handicaps. You will find the full list of operators holding a Minister of Finance licence in our register of licensed bookmakers, and you can compare the offer on the European cups in our bookmaker ranking – for example the review of AdmiralBet.

Frequently asked questions

How many qualifying rounds can a Polish club play before it reaches the league phase?

It depends on which route the club starts from – the lower the country’s ranking position, the more rounds have to be passed. In the longest variant, the route leads through several qualifying rounds plus a play-off round before the club reaches the league phase of any of the three competitions at all.

What happens to a club that loses in the Champions League qualifiers?

It is not knocked out of Europe – the system is a “parachute” one. A club eliminated on one qualifying path goes automatically into a lower competition (from the Champions League to the Europa League, from the Europa League to the Conference League), keeping the right to carry on playing rather than just a consolation payment.

How much does the qualifying round itself pay if the club is eliminated in it?

The fixed rate is €175k for each round played, plus a one-off bonus for being eliminated at a given stage (from €150k in the first Conference League qualifying round to €750k for elimination in the last play-off). That is still a fraction of what reaching the league phase brings.

How does the starting fee in the Conference League differ from the Europa League and the Champions League?

The scale is very uneven: the starting fee for taking part in the league phase alone is about €3.17m in the Conference League, €4.31m in the Europa League and as much as €18.62m in the Champions League – these figures themselves show why progression “up” the European ladder is worth so much more than simply reaching the league phase of the lowest of the three cups.

Is a win in a qualifying match also rewarded separately?

Not in qualifying – there only the fixed fee per round plus the bonus for progressing or being eliminated counts. Win and draw bonuses (e.g. €400k for a win in the Conference League league phase) apply only once the club enters the league phase proper.

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