Predicting the 2026 UEFA Champions League winner based on past winners - ESPN

These are the teams that have won the past 10 UEFA Champions League titles: Real Madrid, Liverpool, Bayern Munich, Chelsea, Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain.

Those teams also comprise six of the eight sides on what UEFA is calling the «Silver Path,» or the top half, of the 2026 Champions League bracket. These teams have combined to win 31 Champions League titles, and they've finished second another 15 times. At most, only one of them will reach the final this season.

As for the other side, which we're officially calling the «Blue Path,» I guess? Their last title came in 2015, and the eight teams on that side have combined for five European Cups and nine more second-place finishes. Apart from Barcelona, no one else on that side of the bracket has a single Champions League trophy.

We got a first-time winner last year, and the way the bracket fell this year has seriously opened up the possibility for it to happen again. Though their odds are still way lower than 50%, Arsenal are sizable betting favorites to win the whole thing.

But will they? Like we do every year, we're going to look back at all of the past champions for whom we have advanced data, and figure out which of the 16 remaining teams looks the most like a winner.

All data, unless otherwise noted, comes from Opta and Stats Perform.

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Rather than leaning only on goals, we're going to adopt a hybrid of goalscoring and chance creation that I've referred to in the past as «adjusted goals.» This, simply, is a blend of 70% expected goals (xG) and 30% actual goals — a better measure of