Celtic will play Stuttgart and Nottingham Forest will face Fenerbahce in two-legged play-offs to reach the last 16 of the Europa League.<\/p>\n
Martin O’Neill’s side could also have been drawn against Hungarian club Ferencvaros, managed by Robbie Keane, but will instead face the Bundesliga club.<\/p>\n
The first leg will be at Celtic Park and the winners of the tie will play either Porto – who defeated O’Neill’s side in the 2003 Uefa Cup final – or another Portuguese side Braga in the last 16.<\/p>\n
Forest, whose alternative tie was against Greek side Panathinaikos, will play Midtjylland or Real Betis if they progress past the Turkish club.<\/p>\n
The play-off games will take place on 19 and 26 February.<\/p>\n
Celtic booked their spot in the play-offs with a 4-2 win against Utrecht which secured 21st place in the league phase table.<\/p>\n
Forest won 4-0 against Ferencvaros in their final league game to finish 13th and earn a home tie in the second leg of the play-off.<\/p>\n
The top eight teams from the league phase – Lyon, Aston Villa, Midtjylland, Real Betis, Porto, Braga, Freiburg and Roma – have all qualified for the last 16.<\/p>\n
The 2026 Europa League final will take place on 20 May at Besiktas Park in Istanbul, Turkey.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Celtic will play Stuttgart and Nottingham Forest will face Fenerbahce in two-legged play-offs to reach the last 16…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":272025,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-272024","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272024","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=272024"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272024\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/272025"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=272024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=272024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=272024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}