Seedings confirmed for UEFA Cup

The draw for the UEFA Cup group stage will take place at UEFA headquarters in Nyon, Switzerland, on Tuesday. Forty teams await their fate as proceedings get under way at 12.00CET.

Five groups
The participants will be drawn into eight groups of five, live on uefa.com, with each side playing two games at home and two away. The teams will be allocated to five pots, in accordance with their respective club coefficients. Pot 1 will comprise the top eight sides, with Villarreal CF boasting the highest coefficient; Pot 2 will consist of the following eight teams in the rankings, and so on for pots 3, 4 and 5. Clubs from the same national association cannot be pitted together.

Past masters
There are UEFA club competition winners in every grouping, from the four-time European champions FC Bayern München in Pot 1, to the 1983 UEFA Cup Winners' Cup victors Aberdeen FC in Pot 5. The winners, runners-up and third-placed sides from each group progress to the last 32 where they are joined by the eight third-placed teams from the UEFA Champions League group stage. At this point, the traditional two-game format is used with the exception of the final. The competition climaxes at the home of Manchester City FC on 14 May 2008.