Chelsea, Liverpool to contest UEFA Super Cup

The first all-English UEFA Super Cup match will feature Liverpool and Chelsea on 14 August in Istanbul.

Liverpool’s 2-0 victory over Tottenham Hotspur in the UEFA Champions League final on Saturday sealed their place against Chelsea, who had beaten Arsenal 4-1 last Wednesday to win the UEFA Europa League.

The two teams will meet shortly after the start of the Premier League season the weekend before.

Liverpool and Chelsea will learn their opening Premier League opponents when the fixtures are released at 11am on Thursday, 13 June.

For Liverpool it is their sixth time to play the UEFA match, winning three times. They were the most recent English winners, beating CSKA Moscow in 2005.

It will be the club’s first participation in the spectacle since 2005, when Rafael Benitez’s side beat CSKA Moscow 3-1 in Monaco.

Chelsea have played three previous Super Cup matches. They beat Real Madrid 1-0 in Monaco in 1998, the third trophy they won that calendar year having qualified by lifting the Cup Winners’ Cup. Their other two appearances ended in defeat – 4-1 to Atletico Madrid in 2012, again in Monaco, and the following year when a penalty shoot-out decided a match against Bayern Munich in Prague.

The host ground is the new Besiktas stadium on the banks of the Bosphorus. Although Chelsea played Besiktas in the group stage of the 2003/04 Champions League, the away game was moved to Gelsenkirchen in Germany due to security concerns so this will be our first visit to this Turkish club’s home ground. We have previously played at Galatasaray and Fenerbahce in Istanbul.

The reconstructed stadium, which opened in 2016, was built on the same site as Beskitas’ old İnonu Stadium.

-Story by Premier League