THEAfter starting the league phase with the worst defeat of the season, a 3-0 against Copenhagen at the Parken Stadium, Sporting de Braga is forced to beat Gent, not only to erase the bad image left in Denmark, but above all to ‘calm’ the atmosphere around the team and Spanish coach Carlos Vicens.
The Minho team will host the Belgian emblem with a record of three consecutive defeats (and four consecutive games without winning) in all competitions, something that the club has never experienced with Vicens at the helm and that has not happened since 2022.
For this reason, the Braga Municipal Stadium promises to be ‘boiling’ on Thursday, three days after the home defeat against Gil Vicente (2-1), which left the Vicens team in eighth place in the I League, with just 11 points in eight rounds.
Gent arrives at Minho as the isolated leader of their championship, with seven wins and just one draw, but suffered a heavy defeat last weekend, falling early in the Cup in Belgium in a penalty shoot-out against Rochefort, in the amateur divisions.
In the first round, Gent, who usually have the Portuguese Tiago Araújo, a player trained at Benfica and who played for Arouca and Estoril on the left side of the defense, received and won 1-0 against AGF, the current Danish champion and also Braga’s future opponent in this league stage.
The 2026/27 edition has two Portuguese coaches, with Ricardo Sá Pinto, in the Cypriots of Pafos, hosting Riga FC, after a defeat in the debut against Atalanta (3-1), one of the candidates to win the competition this season.
Filipe Coelho, with Romanian side Universitatea Craiova, will go to Andorra to face Inter d’Escaldes, after the home draw with Getafe (1-1), in a match that will be historic.
Inter d’Escaldes is the first Andorra team to reach the main stage of a UEFA competition and this will be the first ever game of this importance in the region.
The duels between Monaco and Friborg, the defeated finalist of the last Europa League, and Ajax and Atalanta appear as the ‘headlines’ of the second round, in what is seen as a third division of European competitions.
The teams in the competition will play six games in the league phase, with the top eight qualifying directly for the round of 16, while the teams classified between ninth and 24th place will compete in a play-off to access the next phase. The remaining teams, from 25th onwards, are eliminated from European competitions.
