UEFA Play-off Round Draw

All the detail for the five Scottish clubs ahead of Monday morning's draw

The play-off round draws take place tomorrow, setting out the final hurdle before the league phase. The Champions League draw begins at 11am, followed by the Europa League at noon and the Conference League at 1pm.

All five Scottish clubs remain in Europe. Four play the first legs of their third qualifying round ties on Thursday: Rangers and Motherwell at 5pm, with Hearts and Hibs kicking off at 8pm.

Because the play-off draw happens before those ties are played, tomorrow’s draw will ensure each side will already know who awaits them in every possible scenario.

One general note before getting into the specifics: country protection still applies, so a pairing on the seeded side can never be drawn against a pairing on the unseeded side if either team involved is from the same association.

For example, the losers of Rangers Vs Jagiellonia cannot be paired with any of the three Scottish sides in the Conference League play-off draw.

Due to the nature of the draws, there is the possibility that two Scottish teams could be waiting on the outcome of the same tie.
For example Celtic could be facing the winners of a tie in the Champions League while Rangers could play the losers of that same tie in the Europa League.

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Celtic
(seeded)

Celtic are one of the seeded entrants in the Champions League’s Champions Path. There are no morning groupings to narrow down potential opponents, and so all five of the unseeded options below will be the possibilities for Celtic.

These are the only five sets of opponents Celtic can face, and there’s no narrowing down on the morning of the draw.

This is a fairly favourable set of potential opponents and Celtic should progress against any of them - especially now AEK Athens have moved to the seeded side. Avoiding trips to either Kairat or Sabah would be preferable.

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Hearts

Hearts’ Europa League third qualifying round tie couldn’t be harder, drawn against the highest ranked team in qualifiers, Benfica. Tomorrow’s draw sets out both of their possible paths - Europa League play-off if they progress past Benfica, Conference League play-off if they don’t.

Europa League - (seeded)

For Hearts, they would be on the seeded side of the Europa League play-off round should they progress past Benfica, and as such there are 12 sets of potential opponents.

These are made up of teams that enter in this round, teams that will progress from QR3 and teams that will drop down from Champions League QR3. The 12 teams will be narrowed down to four at 07:30am tomorrow morning.