Hyundai Motor Co. signed a five-season agreement on Monday to sponsor and become the Automotive Partner of the UEFA Champions League, filling a category that Europe’s governing body had been unable to sell since Nissan’s contract ended in 2021.
The deal runs from the 2026/27 season, whose league phase opens on Tuesday, to the end of 2030/31 and extends to the UEFA Super Cup, the UEFA Youth League and the Futsal Champions League.
No value was disclosed.
“Football has been part of this company for almost 30 years,” president and CEO José Muñoz wrote on LinkedIn. “We have supported the game at the highest level since 1999, we renewed our FIFA partnership through 2030, and this summer we were at the FIFA World Cup 2026. European club football is where the best clubs in the world compete every week in front of the most passionate supporters anywhere.”
The Car It Is Selling
The activation opens with the Ioniq 3, the compact electric hatchback that Hyundai says was “designed and developed in Europe for European customers,” shown at Milan Design Week and in production at İzmit, Turkey, since August as the first fully electric vehicle built there,
Hyundai calls it the first of five models it will bring to Europe during the 2026/27 season.
“Following Hyundai’s engagement at the World Cup this summer, the UEFA Champions League is an ideal platform to show our beautifully designed vehicles with features fans love,” Muñoz said in the release.
27 Years of Football
Hyundai has been a FIFA partner since 1999, when its first agreement covered 13 competitions including the 2002 World Cup in Korea and Japan.
Kia joined for 2006, and in May 2023 the group renewed both brands through 2030, adding its Boston Dynamics robotics and Supernal air-mobility units to the agreement.
Hyundai and Kia sponsored UEFA’s European Championship through the 2016 edition, and the Champions League deal returns Hyundai to UEFA a decade later at the club level.
The Champions League category has had three holders in 34 seasons: Ford from the competition’s 1992 relaunch to 2013, Nissan from 2014/15 to 2020/21, and now Hyundai after five seasons without an automotive partner.
The Wider Market
Hyundai’s move is the first competition-level automotive sponsorship in European football by any manufacturer since 2021, and it sets the two biggest spenders on opposite bets.
Volkswagen, which held UEFA’s national-team category from 2018 to 2022, declined to renew for Euro 2024 for “cost discipline reasons” and in August 2025 bought league rights instead.
The brand became the official vehicle of LaLiga EA Sports and LaLiga Hypermotion and global sponsor of Liga F, and Serie A’s first-ever league-level automotive partner.
BYD took the Euro 2024 slot Volkswagen vacated, becoming the first Chinese and first pure-EV maker to hold a UEFA tournament category, and sponsored the Under-21 Championship in 2025; since then the Chinese entrants have bought clubs, with BYD at Inter, Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain, Polestar at Borussia Dortmund, MG at Arsenal and Lyon and Chery at Bournemouth.
Nissan is the mirror image, having left the Champions League in 2021 and Manchester City in February, replaced at the club by BYD and in the competition by Hyundai.
Hyundai Motor America separately became a commercial partner of Inter Miami in Major League Soccer.
