2024–25 European Rugby Champions Cup
| 2024–25 European Rugby Champions Cup | |
|---|---|
| Tournament details | |
| Countries |  England France Ireland Italy Scotland South Africa |
| Tournament format(s) | Modified round-robin and knockout |
| Date | 6 December 2024 – 24 May 2025 |
| Tournament statistics | |
| Teams | 24 |
| Matches played | 60 |
| Attendance | 988,025 (16,467 per match) |
| Highest attendance | 55,627 – Leinster v Harlequins 5 April 2025 |
| Lowest attendance | 4,642 – Benetton v Bath 15 December 2024 |
| Tries scored | 463 (7.72 per match) |
| Top point scorer(s) | Thomas Ramos (Toulouse) 87 points |
| Top try scorer(s) | Damian Penaud (Bordeaux) 12 tries |
| Final | |
| Venue | Principality Stadium, Cardiff, Wales |
The 2024–25 European Rugby Champions Cup (known as the 2024–25 Investec Champions Cup for sponsorship reasons) is the eleventh season of the European Rugby Champions Cup, the annual club rugby union competition run by European Professional Club Rugby (EPCR) for professional clubs. It is the 30th season of the pan-European professional club rugby competition and the second season in which Investec are named as title sponsors.
For the first time since its 1995 founding (as the Heineken Cup), no Welsh teams are playing in the ERCC, as none of them finished in the top seven of the 2023–24 United Rugby Championship.[1] The final will be played at the Principality Stadium in Cardiff, Wales.[2][3]
Stade Toulousain, also known as simply Toulouse, enter the competition as defending champions, seeking a record seventh title. Leinster Rugby, beaten finalists in the past three editions, seek a record fourth consecutive final, and to become the second team after Toulouse to win a fifth Champions Cup.
Teams
Twenty-four clubs from the three major European domestic and regional leagues will qualify to compete in the 2024–25 edition of the Champions Cup.[4]
The distribution of teams is:
- England: eight clubs
- The top eight clubs from the 2023–24 Premiership.
- France: eight clubs
- The top eight clubs from the 2023–24 Top 14. The European champions, Toulouse qualified in the top eight of the French league.
- Ireland, Italy, Scotland and South Africa: eight clubs
- The top seven sides from the 2023–24 United Rugby Championship.
- The champions of the 2023–24 Challenge Cup (Sharks), who displaced the eighth-placed side in the URC (Ospreys) to take the final qualification spot.[5]
| Premiership | Top 14 | United Rugby Championship | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| England
|
France
|
Ireland
|
Italy
|
Scotland
|
South Africa
| |
Team details
Below is the list of coaches, captain and stadiums with their method of qualification for each team.
Note: Placing shown in brackets, denotes standing at the end of the regular season for their respective leagues, with their end of season positioning shown through CH for Champions, RU for Runner-up, SF for losing Semi-finalist, and QF for losing Quarter-finalist.
Pool stage
Teams were drawn into pools in Cardiff on 2 July 2024.[3] Teams are awarded four points for a win, two for a draw, one for scoring four tries in a game, and one for losing by less than eight points.
The format is, once again, a modified round robin. Each pool consists of six teams, two from each of the three contributing leagues. Each team plays the four teams not from its own league once, with one game away to each league and one game at home. Teams do not play their league partners at this stage. The top four teams go to the first knock out round, where the top two teams in each group are given home advantage. The fifth placed teams 'drop' into the Challenge Cup knockout rounds, joining twelve clubs from that competition's pool stages in the knockout stage as the ninth to twelfth seeds, earning away ties with the fifth-to eighth-ranked sides from the Challenge Cup's pool stage. The sixth placed team in each group is eliminated.
Red: Pool 1; 
Blue: Pool 2; 
Green: Pool 3; 
