NYON – Sunderland have not played European football since 1973. On Friday a draw in Switzerland sent them to the San Siro.
That is the tie of the round, and it is not close. AC Milan away, in a stadium that has held European Cup finals, for a club whose supporters have spent five decades watching other people’s continental nights. The 2026-27 Europa League league phase draw produced a long list of fixtures on Friday, and most of them will be forgotten by September. That one will not.
The format spreads 36 clubs across a single table, each playing eight matches rather than the old six-team group. It is a system built to manufacture exactly this kind of pairing, throwing clubs from opposite ends of European football’s food chain at each other without the buffer of a seeded group, and on Friday it worked as designed. Sunderland also drew Anderlecht, Jagiellonia Bialystok, Lech Poznan and the Portuguese second-division side Torreense away, with AZ Alkmaar, Dinamo Zagreb and Levski Sofia at the Stadium of Light.
The Torreense fixture carries its own oddity. The club is from Torres Vedras, north of Lisbon, and will host its league phase matches at the Estadio do Algarve, several hours south. Clubs promoted into European competition without a compliant stadium routinely have to borrow one, and the result is a home tie played in front of whoever is willing to travel to it.
Bournemouth’s draw is the other one worth sitting with. This is the first continental competition in the club’s history, and the first name out for a home fixture was AC Milan. Viktoria Plzen, Sturm Graz and Hapoel Beersheba also travel to the south coast, while Bournemouth go to Real Sociedad, Celta Vigo, Sparta Prague and Lillestrom. For a club that was in the fourth tier fifteen years ago, a home match against a seven-time European champion is a significant evening regardless of what Milan’s form looks like by then.
Milan, for their part, now have away trips to both Bournemouth and Sunderland, which is a strange sentence to write about a club whose history in this competition runs through the names Eastern Herald noted when Franco Baresi died earlier this month. The Rossoneri’s presence in the Europa League rather than the Champions League is itself a measure of where the club has been sitting domestically, and two trips to English seaside towns is the kind of assignment that tends to reveal whether a squad has rebuilt or merely reorganised.
Crystal Palace enter as Conference League holders and drew the hardest schedule of the three English clubs. Lyon, Salzburg, Jagiellonia and Besiktas away is a genuinely awkward set, and Besiktas in Istanbul is the sort of atmosphere that has undone better-resourced sides. At Selhurst Park they take Real Sociedad, Sparta Prague, Lech Poznan and Hoffenheim. Palace have spent the summer managing departures rather than arrivals, including the defender who moved to Chelsea as Maxence Lacroix joined Xabi Alonso’s rebuild, and eight extra fixtures will test a squad that was already stretched.
What the draw does not settle is the thing everyone actually wants to know, which is what any of these clubs will look like in three weeks. The league phase begins on 16 and 17 September, by which point the transfer window will have closed and the shape of these squads will be fixed. Sunderland’s is the least predictable of the lot. A club returning to Europe after 53 years has no institutional memory of how to schedule a Thursday-Sunday rhythm, and promoted sides have historically found that the fixture congestion costs them more in the league than the European run returns.
The competition also carries a different weight than it did. Aston Villa won it last season, beating Freiburg in the final in Istanbul, and the Champions League place that comes with it has turned the Europa League from a consolation into a route. Clubs that once fielded reserve sides in the early rounds no longer can. That change is what makes Bournemouth against Milan a real fixture rather than a curiosity.
The final is at Frankfurt on 26 May 2027, which is nine months and eight league phase matches away, and a great deal of what happens in between will be decided by squads that do not yet exist in their final form. What is fixed is the pairing. Sunderland, who last played in Europe when the club had just won the FA Cup, will walk out at the San Siro.
Whether anyone at the club has worked out how to get 3,000 supporters to Milan on a Thursday is a separate problem, and one nobody has solved yet.
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