EuroLeague 2026-27 Format Explained

The EuroLeague is Europe's top club basketball competition. In 2026-27 it has 20 clubs in a single league table, and every club plays every other club twice, once at home and once away: 38 regular-season games each, from Thursday 24 September 2026 to Friday 16 April 2027.

When the regular season ends, the top six go straight into the playoffs, the clubs from seventh to tenth play the Play-In Showdown for the last two playoff places, and the bottom ten are finished for the season. The eight playoff teams play best-of-five series, and the four winners meet at the Final Four at the end of May.

The Play-In is played on Tuesday 20 and Friday 23 April 2027, and every game is a single game hosted by the club that finished higher. Seventh plays eighth, and the winner takes the seventh playoff place and meets the regular season's second-placed club in the quarter-finals.

Ninth plays tenth, and the loser of that game is eliminated. The winner then plays the loser of seventh against eighth for the last playoff place, which comes with a quarter-final against the club that finished first. So seventh and eighth get two chances, and ninth and tenth have to win twice.

The playoffs are four best-of-five series, seeded by the regular-season table, starting on Tuesday 27 April and finishing by Wednesday 12 May 2027. The higher seed hosts games 1 and 2 and, if the series goes the distance, game 5; the lower seed hosts games 3 and 4.

The four series winners play the Final Four on the fifth weekend of May: the semi-finals on Friday 28 May and the Championship Game on Sunday 30 May 2027. Unlike the playoff series, every Final Four game is a single game, so the title is decided over one weekend.

Regular-season rounds are spread across the evenings from Tuesday to Friday, and some weeks hold two rounds — late October 2026 has rounds 8 and 9 between Tuesday the 27th and Friday the 30th, so a club can play twice in four days. Most games tip off between 18:00 and 21:00 Central European time, which is two hours later in Türkiye for most of the season and one hour later while Europe is on summer time, until late October and again from late March.

Three Turkish clubs play the 2026-27 EuroLeague: Anadolu Efes, Beşiktaş and Fenerbahçe. Their home games this season mostly tip off between 20:00 and 21:00 in Türkiye. Every EuroLeague game on MatchCountdown shows its start in your own time zone, so a 20:30 tip-off in Istanbul reads as 18:30 in Madrid or 1:30 PM in New York without any arithmetic.