European Challenge Cup - Format

Format

The 20 teams are five pools of four teams who play each other in home and away matches. Through the 2008–09 competition, the winners of each pool and the three best runners-up qualified for the quarter-finals. From 2009–10, only the winners of each pool qualify for the quarter-finals. The remaining three quarter-final berths go to the third-, fourth- and fifth-best runners-up from the Heineken Cup pool stage. The knockout phase is seeded as follows:

• The four best ECC pool winners are seeded 1 through 4, and will host a quarter-final.
• The three teams parachuting in from the Heineken Cup are seeded 5 through 7, in order of their placement among the second-place teams in the pool stage of that competition.
• The remaining ECC pool winner is the 8 seed.

Another change in 2009–10 was that the ECC adopted a semi-final draw similar to that long employed by the Heineken Cup. Previously, the ECC employed a traditional eight-team bracket (1 vs 8 and 4 vs 5 in the top half, and 2 vs 7 and 3 vs 6 in the bottom half) in which the semi-finals were not reseeded.

Unlike the Heineken Cup, in which semi-finals are held at nominally neutral sites in countries determined by the semi-final draw, the ECC semi-finals are held at home grounds. In 2009–10, any semi-final that matched a team that started in the ECC with one that parachuted in from the Heineken Cup would be hosted by the team that started in the ECC. Otherwise, a draw was used to determine the home team. This rule was abandoned starting with the 2010–11 season; the home teams in the semi-finals are now determined strictly by the draw.