After many years of missed appointments, Manchester City experienced their glory in the Champions League for the first time when they defeated Inter Milan 1-0 in the final last season. Rodri scored the only goal for Pep Guardiola's team in Istanbul.
The English representative was named the number 1 seed in this year's draw, along with the Europa League champion Sevilla. In addition, there are champions of the highest ranked national tournaments, including Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Napoli, Paris St Germain, Feyenoord and Benfica.
The second seed group includes Real Madrid, who hold a record of 14 Champions League titles. In addition, there are two notable names in the Premier League, Arsenal and Manchester United.
For Arsenal, this is the first time they have returned to the most prestigious playground in Europe since the 2016-2017 season. The "Gunners" finished second in the Premier League last season, after Man City.
The fourth Premier League representative is Newcastle, who have not participated in the Champions League for two decades and will fall into the group 4.
In addition to Newcastle, the new faces in this year's tournament include Ligue 1 Lens, who also returned to the Champions League for the first time in 20 years.
Union Berlin made their first appearance in history after finishing fourth in the Bundesliga last season.
The first matches of the group stage will take place on September 19 and 20. The final match of this year's season will be held at Wembley on June 1 next year.
This will be the last season of the Champions League taking place in the current format, which has existed for two decades.
Next season, UEFA will introduce a new group stage, expanding to 36 teams instead of the current 32 teams. Each team will play at least 10 matches with 10 different teams in 2 matches instead of 6 matches as in the old format.
At the end of the group stage, the top 8 teams will go straight to the knockout round, while the teams from 9th to 24th place will play the play-off 2 matches to compete for the remaining 8 spots in the knockout round.
The bonuses of this year's tournament are also very attractive, with UEFA allocating a total of 2 billion Euros to participating clubs.
Each group stage team will receive 15.64 million Euros, while each win will bring in an additional 2.8 million Euros. In terms of bonuses alone, the champion team will have more than 50 million Euros in pocket.
Teams also receive money based on their position in the UEFA club rankings. This means Real Madrid will receive more than €36 million as the top team, with the amount gradually decreasing, so the lowest-ranked team will only receive more than €1 million.
This year's draw event in Monaco will also see UEFA award the Best Men's Player award. Kevin De Bruyne, Erling Haaland and Lionel Messi are the nominated stars.
The 2023 Women's World Cup champions of the Spanish team, Aitana Bonmati Olga Carmona, were nominated in the women's category along with Sam Kerr of Australia.
The draw for the 2023-2024 Champions League group stage will take place at 23:00 on August 31, live on UEFA's homepage.
