Day: October 29, 2025

Champions League is one of the biggest soccer competitions in the world. Winning it doesn’t just give you bragging rights over your cross-town rivals or country; it crowns you as the best club in Europe. It takes more than top talent to win, though. It also takes heart, and a bit of luck.

The 2024-25 season marks the beginning of a new format for Champions League, one that aims to strengthen the synergy between the league phase and the knockout rounds. The league phase rankings will now determine and lay out the bracket for the knockout round of sixteen.

From there, the remaining thirty-two teams will be divided into eight groups of four clubs each. The randomized draw will restrict placing two teams from the same national league in the same group and use a coefficient-based seeding system to create competitive balance within each of the groups. Each team will play its fellow clubs in the group twice: once at home and once away, earning three points for a win and one point for a draw.

Those teams that finish ninth through 16th will be seeded in the knockout play-off draw and will face a team that is ranked between 17th and 24th. The two winners of those play-off ties will then join the final group of 16 clubs that were seeded. Unlike past seasons, which saw country protection in place until the quarterfinals, there will no longer be any protected groups for the knockout round of 16. This means that a team like Liverpool could potentially be drawn against Chelsea.

Esports tournament news is a growing segment of the video game industry. It’s a global competition, watched by millions and backed by major brands. Esports is revolutionising the way consumers follow, watch and engage with video games. The events are arranged by game publishers and are regulated by the games industry to ensure competition is fair and consistent.

In its earliest form, esports consisted of competitive gaming in arcade settings. One of the first cited examples of this was the Intergalactic Spacewar! Olympics in 1972. More recently, esports gained momentum in the 2000s when the concept of professional leagues was pioneered by a company called Major League Gaming (MLG).

The tournaments are typically organized by the game developers themselves or independent organizations that hold rights to organize a particular title’s esports ecosystem. They often feature a variety of formats, from separate events that focus on a specific aspect of the video game, to championships that are designed to crown the best overall team.

May 2025 features a number of notable esports events, including Counter-Strike: Global Offensive’s PGL Bucharest and BLAST Rivals Spring 2025, IEM Spring, Call of Duty: League’s Stage 3 Major and Rocket League’s RLCS Birmingham Major. This month also sees OG, Astralis and FaZe Clan aiming for glory in their respective leagues.

June is a busy month for esports, with the likes of PUBG Mobile’s ESEE World Cup, IEM Cologne and VALORANT Champions 2025 featuring in the calendar. The esports landscape is also being rocked by the start of the new season of Riot’s flagship League of Legends World Championship, which is always one of the most viewed events in esports history.