Arsenal produced the biggest UEFA Champions League Round of 16 victory for some time when they thrashed PSV 7-1 in Eindhoven in 2024/25.
Mikel Arteta’s team headed into the game after back-to-back scoreless outings in the Premier League but Jurrien Timber, Ethan Nwaneri, Mikel Merino, Leandro Trossard and Riccardo Calafiori were all on target as captain Martin Odegaard bagged a brace at the Philips Stadion.
It amounted to Arsenal’s record away victory in the competition and the biggest away triumph in the knockout stage. It also came barely two weeks after Paris Saint-Germain destroyed Ligue 1 counterparts Brest 7-0.
There have been similarly big scores in the early stages of 2025/26. Arsenal put four past Atletico Madrid, while Chelsea and Liverpool thrashed Ajax and Eintracht Frankfurt, respectively.
Here’s our rundown of the biggest Champions League wins of all time.
What is the biggest Champions League win ever?
The biggest wins — or defeats, depending upon your perspective — in the Champions League have been by eight goals.
In 2007, Besiktas lost 8-0 to Liverpool at Anfield, with Ryan Babel and Peter Crouch scoring two apiece.
Eight years and one month later, Real Madrid matched that margin against an overmatched Malmo. Cristiano Ronaldo got four of them, while they needed to find another matchball for fellow hat-trick scorer Karim Benzema.
To be clear, these were all record wins in the Champions League proper, i.e. not in the qualifying rounds. The biggest victory in those preliminaries belongs to Finland’s HJK, who defeated Bangor City 10-0 in July 2011.
Each of those were home wins, but — fear not, PSV — there are three teams who have had it worse on their own patch.
There have been three 7-0 away wins in the Champions League, with Liverpool racking up the most recent of those at Maribor in 2017. Marseille went 7-up at Zilina in 2010, while Shakhtar Donetsk did likewise at BATE Borisov in 2014. Later that season, Shakhtar shipped a 7-0 defeat of their own at Bayern Munich.
Biggest UEFA Champions League wins
*Champions League era only. Not including qualifying rounds
| Date | Match | Scoreline |
| Nov 6, 2007 | Liverpool vs. Besiktas | 8-0 |
| Dec 12, 2015 | Real Madrid vs. Malmo | 8-0 |
| Sep 17, 2024 | Bayern Munich vs. Dinamo Zagreb | 9-2 |
| Dec 10, 2003 | Juventus vs. Olympiacos | 7-0 |
| Oct 23, 2007 | Arsenal vs. Slavia Praha | 7-0 |
| Nov 3, 2010 | Zilina vs. Marseille | 0-7 |
| Nov 23, 2011 | Valencia vs. Genk | 7-0 |
| Mar 13, 2012 | Bayern Munich vs. Basel | 7-0 |
| Oct 21, 2014 | BATE Borisov vs. Shakhtar Donetsk | 0-7 |
| Mar 11, 2015 | Bayern Munich vs. Shakhtar Donetsk | 7-0 |
| Sep 13, 2016 | Barcelona vs. Celtic | 7-0 |
| Oct 17, 2017 | Maribor vs. Liverpool | 0-7 |
| Dec 6, 2017 | Liverpool vs. Spartak Moscow | 7-0 |
| Mar 12, 2019 | Manchester City vs. Schalke | 7-0 |
| Feb 19, 2025 | Paris Saint-Germain vs. Brest | 7-0 |
Bayern scored the most goals in a Champions League match in the 2024/25 league phase but their game with Dinamo Zagreb finished 9-2, making it one of 13 seven-goal wins on the books.
PSV almost suffered the biggest defeat endured by a former winner of the competition but that distinction remains with Celtic, who were thrashed 7-0 by Barcelona in 2016.
Noa Lang’s 43rd-minute penalty against Arsenal might not have counted for much, but it served to keep PSV out of the grimmest pages of the history books.
What is the biggest European Cup win ever?
If we go back to the days of the European Cup — so, before 1992 — then the biggest win in the tournament’s history belongs to Romania’s Dinamo Bucharest.
In the first round of the 1973/74 tournament, they beat Northern Ireland’s Crusaders 11-0, with Dudu Georgescu and Radu Nunweiller each scoring four goals.
