Azerbaijani FIFA referee to officiate UEFA Europa League play-off round match

Azerbaijani FIFA referee Aliyar Aghayev has been appointed to officiate the first leg of the UEFA Europa League play-off round match between RFS (Latvia) and APOEL (Cyprus), Azernews reports.

He will be supported by his fellow Azerbaijani referees, Zeynal Zeynalov and Akif Amirali, with Ingilab Mammadov acting as the fourth official.

The match will be played on August 22 at the LNK Sporta Parks in Riga, Latvia.

The UEFA Champions League is UEFA's elite club competition, with top clubs across the continent playing for the right to be crowned European champions.

Introduced in 1955 as the European Cup, it has expanded over the years with over 70 football clubs.

The number of teams of each association that enters the UEFA Champions League is based on the UEFA coefficients of the member associations.

These scores are generated by the results of clubs representing each association during the previous five UEFA Champions League and UEFA Europa League seasons.

Qualifying starts in the summer with three rounds, and then a play-off takes place before 32 teams begin the group stage starting in September.