The 2023–24 UEFA Europa League knockout phase began on 15 February with the knockout round play-offs and ended on 22 May 2024 with the final at the Aviva Stadium in Dublin, Republic of Ireland, to decide the champions of the

2023–24 UEFA Europa League The 2023–24 UEFA Europa League will be the 53rd season of Europe's secondary club football tournament organised by UEFA, and the 15th season since it was renamed from the UEFA Cup to the UEFA Europa League. The final will be played at the Av ...

. A total of 24 teams competed in the knockout phase. Times are CET/

CEST CEST or cest may refer to: * Central European Summer Time (UTC+2), daylight saving time observed in the central European time zone * Cognitive-Experiential Self-Theory * Chemical Exchange Saturation Transfer, a subset of Magnetization transfer in ...

, as listed by UEFA (local times, if different, are in parentheses).

Qualified teams

The knockout phase involved 24 teams: the 16 teams which qualified as winners and runners-up of each of the eight groups in the group stage, and the eight third-placed teams from the Champions League group stage.

Europa League group stage winners and runners-up

Champions League group stage third-placed teams

Format

Each tie in the knockout phase, apart from the final, was played over

two legs In sports (particularly association football), a two-legged tie is a contest between two teams which comprises two matches or "legs", with each team as the home team in one leg. The winning team is usually determined by aggregate score, the sum ...

, with each team playing one leg at home. The team that scored more goals on aggregate over the two legs advanced to the next round. If the aggregate score was level, then 30 minutes of

extra time Overtime or extra time is an additional period of play specified under the rules of a sport to bring a game to a decision and avoid declaring the match a tie or draw where the scores are the same. In some sports, this extra period is played onl ...

was played (the

away goals rule The away goals rule is a method of tiebreaker, tiebreaking in association football and other sports when teams play each other twice, once at each team's home ground. Under the away goals rule, if the total goals scored by each team are equal, the ...

was not applied). If the score was still level at the end of extra time, the winners were decided by a penalty shoot-out. In the final, which was played as a single match, if the score was level at the end of normal time, extra time was played, followed by a penalty shoot-out if the score was still level.

The mechanism of the draws for each round was as follows: *In the draw for the knockout round play-offs, the eight group runners-up were seeded, and the eight Champions League group third-placed teams were unseeded. The seeded teams were drawn against the unseeded teams, with the seeded teams hosting the second leg. Teams from the same association could not be drawn against each other. *In the draw for the round of 16, the eight group winners were seeded, and the eight winners of the knockout round play-offs were unseeded. Again, the seeded teams were drawn against the unseeded teams, with the seeded teams hosting the second leg. Teams from the same association could not be drawn against each other. *In the draws for the quarter-finals onwards, there were no seedings, and teams from the same association could be drawn against each other. As the draws for the quarter-finals and semi-finals were held together before the quarter-finals were played, the identity of the quarter-final winners was not known at the time of the semi-final draw. A draw was also held to determine which semi-final winner would be designated as the "home" team for the final (for administrative purposes as it was played at a neutral venue).

In the knockout phase, teams from the same or nearby cities ( Benfica and Sporting CP) were not scheduled to play at home on the same day, due to logistics and crowd control. To avoid such scheduling conflicts, adjustments had to be made by UEFA. For the knockout round play-offs and a round of 16, since both teams were drawn to play at home in a given leg, the home match of the team that was not domestic cup champions in the qualifying season, or the team with the lower domestic ranking (if neither team were the domestic cup champions, i.e. Sporting CP for this season), was moved from Thursday to Wednesday. For the quarter-finals and semi-finals, if the two teams were drawn to play at home for the same leg, the order of legs of the tie involving the team with the lowest priority would be reversed from the original draw.

Bracket