Ararat-Armenia in the Europa League: the eight opponents, and how many points they are worth
On 27 August, Ararat-Armenia beat Universitatea Craiova and became the first Armenian club to reach the league phase of the Europa League. The next morning a computer in Monaco gave them eight opponents. Two of those clubs have already knocked them out of Europe in the last thirteen months, and both are coming to Yerevan.
What follows is an attempt to work out what that draw is actually worth. We went through every opponent, looked at what condition each of them will be in on the night they play Ararat-Armenia, worked out what a points total buys you in this format, and built a model that puts a number on all eight games.
Ararat-Armenia were handed the easiest schedule in the competition and are still projected near the bottom of it for points. Both of those are true at once. The space between them is smaller than it looks, and it is where the season gets decided.
Getting here
Ararat-Armenia played eight European matches across two competitions before this league phase started. They went into the Champions League first qualifying round in July, came out of it in August, and landed in the Europa League play-off with one life left.
It was not a soft route. They lost in Riga and lost in Dublin and won both ties anyway. Then they ran into the Slovenian champions and lost a tie they had spent most of two legs winning, which is a story worth telling properly later on.
They have already beaten four clubs ranked above them this season, one of which is in this same league phase.
How they play, and who plays
Tulipa wants his team to have the ball, which is not what most people expect from a club arriving out of the Armenian league.
They can also do without it. Against Celje in Yerevan they went behind to a penalty, took the game to the Slovenian champions and won it playing forward. Six weeks later Craiova had more of the ball and looked sharper, and Ararat-Armenia dropped off, defended well and won anyway. Most sides at this level manage one of those. This one has done both, against opponents ranked above them, inside two months.
The second thing worth knowing is that most of it is new. Four of the players who got them through arrived in the first days of July, and one arrived in August.
| Player | Position | Signed | From |
|---|---|---|---|
| João Bravim | Goalkeeper | 2 July 2026 | CD Santa Clara |
| Bruno Wilson | Defender | 2 July 2026 | free agent |
| Carlos França | Attack | 1 July 2026 | Persijap Jepara |
| Sandro Lima | Attack | 2 July 2026 | FC Alverca |
| Benny | Midfield | 3 August 2026 | CA Petróleos Luanda |
Benny signed four days before the first leg against Celje. The team that has just made history had been playing together for about eight weeks.
Where the goals came from
Ararat-Armenia scored 11 goals in the eight qualifying matches. They came from seven players, and one of them dominates.
Sandro Lima is 35, arrived from Alverca in July, and scored against Riga, twice against Shamrock Rovers, and in the eighth minute of stoppage time against Craiova to send Ararat-Armenia through. Four of the eleven, and the only one that settled a tie.
He is also the kind of centre forward Armenian clubs have not had for a long time. He holds the ball with his back to goal, works in tight areas, shoots from distance, presses from the front and wins the small duels that let a team defending deep get up the pitch. For a side that will spend most of this league phase without the ball, a striker who can keep it on his own is worth more than a quicker one.
Carlos França scored the winner against Celje and the second against Riga without starting either match, or any European tie at all. Alexandros Malis, a centre back, scored the away goal in Craiova that made the second leg possible.
Home and away are two different teams
This is the split that should shape every expectation of the league phase.
Four home games, four wins, seven goals scored and one conceded. Four away games, no wins, four scored and eight conceded. Five matches either side is a small sample, but it points where Noah's Conference League campaign pointed last season, and our model follows it: two thirds of Ararat-Armenia's expected points sit in the four nights in Yerevan.
Ararat-Armenia have two teams
We pulled every team sheet Tulipa has named this season, the eight European ties and all five league games, and the separation is close to total.
Nine players have started at least six of the eight European ties. Eleven have started at least three of the five league games. Exactly one player, Julio Bueno, is a regular in both.
Watch what happened after the play-off. Ararat-Armenia beat Craiova on 27 August, then played Pyunik four days later. Three of the eleven who won that tie started the league game. Lima, Serobyan, Muradyan, Grigoryan, Wilson, Malis, Banjaqui and Benny were all on the bench or out of the squad. Ararat-Armenia lost 2-1 and Tulipa will do it again.
The domestic table reflects it. Ten points from five league games, a draw with Sardarapat and a defeat at Pyunik, while the European side has won every home tie it has played.
For this league phase it means two things. The side that faces Sparta Praha on 16 September will have played eight matches together and very little else. And its alternates are not rusty reserves, they are getting ninety minutes every weekend.
The European eleven
The shape is not a guess. Tulipa has named a 4-3-3 in seven of the eight European ties, the exception being a 3-4-3 away at Shamrock Rovers, and the personnel barely move.
Six players have started all eight: Bravim, Julio Bueno, Muradyan, Oliveira, Serobyan and Lima. Wilson and Grigoryan have seven each, Malis six. Only one slot genuinely rotates, the left of the midfield three, where Tera has four starts and Carlier and Benny have shared the rest.
In goal, Bravim's saves have carried the campaign and the Craiova play-off was the clearest case. Tulipa has been open about the trade-off with Bruno Pinto, who kept goal here before him: Pinto was the better footballer with the ball, Bravim the better shot-stopper. Against this draw the saves are worth more.
The back four reads left to right as Grigoryan, Malis, Wilson, Bueno. The right side is improvised. Kamo Hovhannisyan started the first three European ties there, came off on 75 minutes against Shamrock Rovers in Yerevan on 21 July, and has not appeared in a squad since, in Europe or the league, having picked up an injury. Julio Bueno has shifted out from centre back to cover, and has carried the ball forward in a way he does not normally. Malis was not at his best against Riga or Shamrock, then was excellent against Celje and Craiova, and scored the away goal in Romania. Grigoryan pushes high from the left and set up a goal against Celje; he is unlucky that Tiknizyan is ahead of him internationally.
Muradyan captains the side and sits deepest of the three in midfield, with Hugo Oliveira, nominally a defender, doing the running on the right of it.
Ahead of them, Lima has been the difference. Eight starts, four of the eleven goals, and the winner in the eighth minute of stoppage time against Craiova that put the club into this league phase. At 35 he holds the ball up, works in tight areas, shoots from range and presses, which is exactly what a team defending deep needs from a centre forward. Serobyan on the right has started all eight and scored against Celje. Banjaqui on the left has five starts and a goal against Shamrock Rovers.
Three players the team sheets change your mind about
Carlos França has not started a single European tie, and has scored twice in them. Both goals, against Riga and the winner against Celje, came off the bench. He starts every league game.
Juan Balanta was Ararat-Armenia's best player last season before a long injury, and the team sheets confirm how far back he still is: no European starts at all, and two league starts. If he returns to his level this is a better team, but that has not happened yet.
Benny signed on 3 August, four days before the first leg against Celje, and did not start either leg of it. He came into the side for both Craiova games, which means the club brought him in and then trusted him with the tie that decided the season.
When Hovhannisyan is fit again, the likely change is Bueno back to centre back and one of Malis or Wilson dropping out. It is the only upgrade obviously available, and a modest one. Tulipa is close to his strongest side already.
The draw
Four at home, four away. Sparta Praha, AZ, NEC and Celje come to Yerevan. The trips are to Białystok, Leiria, Salzburg and Milan.
Three things fall out of the shape of it.
The two most winnable home games come late, NEC in December and Celje in January, so the season should still be alive when the calendar turns. The most winnable away trip, to Torreense, is the one where Tulipa knows the club from the inside, having managed them in 2023/24. And the opening night is against the team that put them out of Europe last season.
Measuring the gap
Start with the part nobody enjoys. Ararat-Armenia's UEFA coefficient is 7.000, which is the joint-lowest of the 36 clubs in this competition, level with Levski Sofia and below everyone else.
Squad values tell the same story more bluntly. Transfermarkt has Ararat-Armenia at 8.31m euros. Milan's squad is worth 497.20m, which is roughly sixty Ararat-Armenias.
Look at Celje. The club that knocked Ararat-Armenia out of the Champions League in August has a squad worth 14.08m against their 8.31m, about 70% more. Seventy percent is a gap you can play through over two legs, and Ararat-Armenia very nearly did. Milan's sixty times is not.
So this draw is really two draws. Four of the eight opponents are inside 3.5 times Ararat-Armenia on coefficient: NEC at 1.9, Torreense at 2.1, Jagiellonia at 3.1 and Celje at 3.3. Those are the games where a campaign gets made. The other four are the ones you survive.
What a points total is worth
Everyone knows the top eight go straight through and ninth to twenty-fourth get a play-off. Very few people know what those lines cost. The format has only run twice, so we took both seasons and worked it out.
| 2024/25 | 2025/26 | |
|---|---|---|
| Winner | 19 pts | 21 pts |
| 8th, direct to the last 16 | 14 pts | 16 pts |
| 16th | 12 pts | 13 pts |
| 24th, the last play-off place | 10 pts | 9 pts |
| 25th, the first club out | 10 pts | 9 pts |
| 36th | 3 pts | 1 pt |
Look at the bottom two rows. In both seasons the play-off place was settled on goal difference between clubs level on points. Fenerbahçe went out on 10, Brann went out on 9. So nine points is not a ticket and it is not a failure. It is a coin toss.
Now the comparison that actually applies. The pots are ordered by coefficient, so pot four is the weak pot by definition, but the spread inside it is enormous. This year it runs from Ararat-Armenia at 7.000 up to Hoffenheim at 18.580, and in 2024/25 it contained Athletic Bilbao, who finished second in the whole competition. Averaging Ararat-Armenia with Athletic Bilbao tells you nothing.
The club worth looking at is the one at the very bottom of pot four, which is exactly the seat Ararat-Armenia are sitting in.
One went through, one did not, and a goal separated them. That is better company than the coefficient chart suggests.
Does any of this predict anything?
We took all 72 club-seasons of this format and plotted final points against coefficient.
That 8% cuts in Ararat-Armenia's favour.
Reputation barely moves the needle in this format. What decides a club's points total is which eight teams it got and what state it was in when it played them. Ararat-Armenia have spent the whole summer proving the point: they were the lower-ranked side in all four qualifying ties and won three of them.
The view from outside
Footballranked model every league phase draw and rank all 36 clubs by the average Elo of the eight opponents they were given. Ararat-Armenia came out 36th of 36, which is the easiest draw in the Europa League.
It is not close, either. Their average opponent rating of 1567 sits 21 points below the next-easiest schedule, the biggest gap anywhere in that ranking. The same model then projects them to take 5.5 points, third-lowest in the competition.
Fifteen of the thirty-six project below 9.5 points. Ararat-Armenia are at the back of a large pack rather than stranded behind it, and two results cover the gap between 5.5 points and nine.
Noah showed how it is done
One Armenian club has already tried this, recently, and in the same stadium.
Noah reached the Conference League league phase in 2025/26 and finished 19th, which was enough for the knockout play-offs. In February they drew AZ Alkmaar, the same AZ that comes to Yerevan on matchday 3, and beat them 1-0 at the Republican Stadium. Hovhannes Hambardzumyan scored just after the hour. It was the first time an Armenian club had won a European knockout tie match.
The shape of that night matters more than the result. AZ had the ball, could not find a way through a compact and disciplined Armenian side, and lost to one moment. Nothing about it depended on luck, and every element of it repeats in October: same stadium, same opponent, same long trip east, same problem to solve.
Then Noah lost the return in Alkmaar and went out. Their competition was the Conference League, a tier below this one, so the comparison is about conditions rather than standard. What travels is the pattern. An Armenian club's European points come at home. Ararat-Armenia have four home games, and that is where the season lives.
The eight opponents
Same shape for each: who they are now, what condition they will be in on the night, and what that is worth. There are no predicted scorelines here. Every game gets a probability instead.
Matchday 1, Sparta Praha at home
Of all the clubs that could have been sent to Yerevan first, the computer picked the one that ended Ararat-Armenia's last European campaign.
In the third qualifying round of the 2025/26 Conference League, Sparta won 2-1 in Yerevan and 4-1 in Prague. That 6-2 aggregate is the entire history between the clubs, and the second leg got away from Ararat-Armenia inside an hour once Sparta found space to run into.
Brian Priske is back in charge, appointed in the summer of 2026 to replace Lars Friis after a fourth-place finish in the Czech league. Priske won two titles here before leaving for Feyenoord, and he wants his teams aggressive without the ball and quick to get it forward.
The two clubs arrive here by routes that are more similar than the gap between them suggests. Both went out of the Champions League in the third qualifying round in August. Sparta lost theirs on the League Path and were handed a place in this league phase automatically, because their coefficient is high enough to cushion the fall. Ararat-Armenia lost theirs to Celje and had to go and win a play-off against Craiova to get in at all. Same round, same month, two very different safety nets.
What that means for 16 September is that neither side is short of competitive football. Both are into their domestic seasons and both have played European ties this summer. Nobody is rusty and nobody has league phase form to scout, which is true of every club on matchday 1.
The reason this game is priced closer than a coefficient gap of 5.5 times would suggest is simpler than form. It is in Yerevan, where Ararat-Armenia won all four of their ties this summer. The risk is equally simple: if the game stretches and Sparta get to run at them, last season showed what follows.
Matchday 2, Jagiellonia Białystok away
On paper this is the second most winnable away trip. The schedule has arranged it about as badly as it could.
Jagiellonia open away at Olympiacos, and whatever happens in Piraeus they are likely to come home with little or nothing. Then they host Ararat-Armenia in their first home game of the campaign, needing a result to keep their own top-24 hopes credible, in a ground that gets genuinely loud.
Adrian Siemieniec is the reason they are dangerous. He took the job absurdly young, won the first league title in the club's history in 2024, and has built a side that plays fast and vertically and attacks space the moment it opens. That is an awkward specific problem, because Ararat-Armenia want the ball, and a team that is happy to concede possession in order to break into the area behind is the worst stylistic match among the four winnable fixtures.
If there is a route to something here it runs through keeping the game slow and the score goalless deep into the second half, then seeing what the last twenty minutes offers. A point in Białystok would be worth more than its face value, because it would come out of the half of the schedule the model expects nothing from.
Matchday 3, AZ Alkmaar at home
This is the one everyone will circle, and the romance and the numbers agree for once.
Lee-Roy Echteld took over at AZ in January 2026 and won the KNVB Cup in his first months. His side are what AZ have been for years: technical, patient, comfortable in possession, built around young players the club develops and then sells.
That last part matters here. AZ sold Troy Parrott to Real Betis in August for a fee reported around 20m euros, which takes the striker who scored their goals out of the team a month before this league phase starts. Kees Smit, the midfielder, is the outstanding talent still in the building. AZ remain far stronger than Ararat-Armenia in every department, but they arrive in this competition having just cashed in their centre forward.
None of which stopped Noah beating them on this pitch in February, in a Conference League knockout tie.
Look at the state they will arrive in, too. Sunderland away and Hapoel at home come first, so AZ will most likely be sitting on three or four points and in no trouble at all. A Thursday in Yerevan on matchday 3, with most of the league phase still to play and an Eredivisie season running underneath it, is exactly the fixture a Dutch squad rotates for.
Ararat-Armenia will see very little of the ball, and that need not be fatal. They have already won a decisive European tie without it. Craiova had more of the ball in the play-off in Yerevan and looked the sharper team for long spells. Ararat-Armenia defended well, took their moment and went through. Being the second team is not a failure state for this side, and against AZ it will be the job.
Matchday 4, Torreense away
The strangest fixture in the competition, and the game Ararat-Armenia's season may turn on.
Torreense play in the Portuguese second division. They won the Taça de Portugal in May 2026 by beating Sporting 2-1 after extra time, the first second-tier club in Portuguese history to win it, and that trophy is the only reason they are here. Days later they lost the promotion play-off to Casa Pia and stayed down. Luís Tralhão has taken over from the manager who won the cup, and the club will be playing these matches in Leiria, about 300 kilometres from Torres Vedras.
Then there is the coincidence no computer intended. Tulipa managed Torreense in 2023/24 before taking the Ararat-Armenia job in June 2025. Of the eight opponents, the one Ararat-Armenia are most likely to beat is the one their manager knows from the inside, down to the players who were there when he was.
A second-division side, in the middle of a promotion race that matters far more to them than this does, three games into a league phase that has probably already gone badly, against a manager who knows the building. This is the only away trip where the expected return is not close to zero, and if Ararat-Armenia are going to finish this campaign on the play-off line, three points in Leiria on 5 November is the likeliest place they come from.
Matchday 5, Red Bull Salzburg away
The hardest night of the eight, and the reasons stack up.
Danny Röhl was appointed in the summer of 2026 and has Salzburg doing what Salzburg do: pressing high, winning the ball early and going at goal in three or four passes. A side that wants to build from the back, away from home, against that press, spends most of the evening playing in its own third and hoping.
The schedule makes it worse. Salzburg's first four are Levski away, Milan at home, Celje away and Anderlecht away, which is three trips and a fixture against one of the favourites. However that run goes, they will treat a home match against the lowest-ranked club in the competition as the night they put it right.
There is no angle here worth overselling. The expected return is 0.43 points, the lowest of the eight alongside Milan.
Matchday 6, NEC Nijmegen at home
On the numbers this is the best fixture Ararat-Armenia have all season. NEC's coefficient of 13.585 is the closest of any opponent, less than twice Ararat-Armenia's, and the game is in Yerevan.
NEC finished third in the Eredivisie last season playing open, attacking football under Dick Schreuder, with Koki Ogawa leading the line and plenty of width. That reputation is deserved, and in this particular fixture it is also a weakness. A team that commits numbers forward, in December, against opponents who will have spent the whole autumn defending this pitch, is offering the game Ararat-Armenia are best equipped to win.
The timing sharpens it. By matchday 6 NEC will have played Juventus away, Levski at home, Dinamo Zagreb away, Omonia at home and Rennes at home. Something around seven points is a fair guess from that run, which puts them right in the fight for a top-24 place and means they have to come to Armenia to win rather than to contain. Teams that must win leave gaps.
Our model gives Ararat-Armenia a 42% chance here, second only to the Celje game in January. If there is a win in the first six matchdays, this is where it is.
Matchday 7, Celje at home, and the tie they should have won
Five months before this game, these two clubs played a Champions League qualifier, and Ararat-Armenia led it for 103 unbroken minutes before going out.
In Yerevan on 4 August they went behind to a Sešlar penalty, came back through Artur Serobyan and won it through França: 2-1 against the Slovenian champions, deserved, and achieved by playing rather than by hanging on. A week later in Celje the second leg was goalless deep into the final ten minutes, with Ararat-Armenia ahead on aggregate and heading for the Champions League play-off round. Dukuly scored on 83 minutes. Verbič scored on 85.
Forget revenge. What that tie settled was the level. Ararat-Armenia were not outplayed by Celje over 180 minutes. They beat them once, held them for 82 minutes in Slovenia, and lost the tie to two goals in a two-minute spell. Celje went on to qualify for this same league phase, and their squad is worth 14.08m euros against Ararat-Armenia's 8.31m. There is far less between these clubs than between Ararat-Armenia and anyone else in the draw.
Vítor Campelos has a balanced side without an obvious star, which is another way of saying there is nobody here who wins a game on their own. Both teams arrive from a winter break, so the fitness advantage a mid-season side would normally carry is flattened. And Celje will have played Leverkusen, Salzburg, Sturm Graz, Ferencváros and Olympiacos by then, most likely sitting mid-table and still alive, which means they have to come and play.
Our model makes this 45%, the highest win probability of the eight, and it gets there on evidence rather than sentiment: Celje are the only opponent in this draw that Ararat-Armenia have already beaten at this ground this season. Every other fixture is priced off a coefficient. This one is priced off a result. If the season is alive on 21 January, this is the game that decides it.
Matchday 8, Milan away
The San Siro, on the final night, against a squad worth sixty times theirs.
Rúben Amorim took the job in July 2026 on a three-year deal after Massimiliano Allegri left and much of the front office went with him. He has Milan playing his back three, and whatever the season has brought them by late January they will not be short of quality on the night.
The only real question is what Milan need. By matchday 8 they will either be safe inside the top eight, in which case a rotated team and a flat evening are plausible, or chasing seeding, in which case they are not. That is worth a small adjustment and nothing more.
None of it matters to the campaign. Nobody's season is judged on what they take from the San Siro, and by 28 January the points will already have been won or lost in Yerevan and Leiria. This is the night Armenian club football gets to stand in one of the great buildings in the sport for the first time.
The model
Every probability here comes out of one model. Here is how it works, so you can argue with it.
For each fixture we take the ratio between the two coefficients and turn it into an expected goal difference. Then we apply three adjustments: home or away, a bonus for playing in Yerevan that we justify with Noah's win over AZ and with Ararat-Armenia's three home wins in qualifying, and a per-fixture adjustment for the state the opponent will be in on the night. That goal difference becomes win, draw and loss probabilities.
It is deliberately blunt about some things. It knows nothing about injuries, suspensions or form, because none of that is knowable in September for a game in January.
Two thirds of the expected points come from the four home games, which is the Noah pattern turning up in arithmetic.
Running those probabilities through 200,000 simulated seasons gives the spread of where this actually finishes.
| Expected points | 7.5 |
| Most likely single total | 7 |
| Reach 9 points, the 2025/26 line | 36% |
| Reach 10 points, the 2024/25 line | 27% |
| Win at least one game | 90% |
| Finish with nothing | 0.5% |
Why we think they beat it
Our model runs on coefficients, and coefficients explain roughly 8% of a league phase. Treat its number as a floor, not a forecast.
Four reasons Ararat-Armenia land above it.
They have beaten their ranking all summer. They were the lower-ranked club in every one of the four qualifying ties and won three, including against Riga and Shamrock Rovers away from home and Craiova over two legs. A model that starts from coefficient has already been wrong about this team four times this year.
They can win two different ways. Against Celje in Yerevan they took the game to the Slovenian champions and won it with the ball. Against Craiova they were second best for long spells, defended properly and won anyway. Most clubs at this level can only do one of those. Tulipa's side have done both inside six weeks, which matters enormously in a competition where they will be favourites in nothing and underdogs in everything.
The three games that decide it are all winnable on merit rather than on luck. NEC are less than twice their coefficient. Celje are a club they have already beaten this season and are worth 14m euros against their 8m. Torreense are a second-division side. None of those requires a miracle, and two of them are at home.
And the line is low. Nine points has been enough once and one goal short once. Three wins gets there, and so does two wins and three draws. Ararat-Armenia have won all four of their European home ties this season.
The call
Our prediction is 9 points and a place in the knockout play-offs.
The model expects 7.5, and about 36% of its simulated campaigns reach nine. We are calling the upper end of that range on purpose.
Coefficients explain roughly 8% of what happens in a league phase. They are the best starting point available in September and still a weak one, so where something better exists it should win. Against Celje it does. Ararat-Armenia beat them at this ground five weeks ago, which is why the January game carries the highest win probability of the eight rather than the fourth.
Then there is the record. This team was the lower-ranked side in all four qualifying ties and won three of them. It has won all four of its European matches in Yerevan this season, scoring seven and conceding one. A model that starts from reputation has already been wrong about Ararat-Armenia four times this summer, and there is no obvious reason it stops being wrong now.
Nine points needs three wins, or two wins and three draws. The three most likely wins are all identifiable and none of them requires a miracle: Torreense away, who are a second-division club; NEC at home, who are the closest opponent in the entire draw on coefficient; and Celje at home, who have already lost here this season. Two of those are in Yerevan.
The line itself has been nine points once and ten once, decided both times on goal difference. So this is not a prediction that Ararat-Armenia have to be extraordinary. It is a prediction that they take care of the three games they should be in, and that the line falls where it has fallen before.
Losing in Leiria on 5 November sinks it. That is the one away trip the campaign cannot waste, because the alternative is needing something from Białystok, Salzburg or the San Siro.
The bottom line
Ararat-Armenia are the lowest-ranked club in the Europa League and were given the easiest schedule in it. Both sentences are true, and the distance between them is the size of the job.
The two clubs who sat in this seat in the previous two seasons finished 24th and 25th, one through and one out, separated by a goal. The play-off line has been nine points and ten. Our model says seven and a half. We are saying nine, and the play-offs.
The margin is one result. It is in Leiria in November, in Yerevan in December, and on the January night Celje come back. Coefficients do not play football, and this team has spent the whole summer proving it.
Eight matches, four of them at home, and the first Armenian club ever to get this far.
Fixtures, coefficients and results from UEFA. Squad values from Transfermarkt, September 2026. Historical league phase tables from the 2024/25 and 2025/26 Europa League. Draw difficulty and external projections from footballranked.com. All probabilities are our own model, described above.