{"id":9790,"date":"2026-06-25T14:08:45","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T14:08:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sportings.com.ng\/?p=9790"},"modified":"2026-06-25T14:08:45","modified_gmt":"2026-06-25T14:08:45","slug":"efl-trophy-group-stage-opponents-confirmed-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sportings.com.ng\/?p=9790","title":{"rendered":"EFL Trophy group-stage opponents confirmed | News"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<p><strong>The group-stage draw for the EFL Trophy took place on Thursday afternoon, as our under-21s found out their opponents for 2026\/27.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Known as the Vertu Trophy, our under-21s will face London sides AFC Wimbledon, Leyton Orient and Barnet in Group F (Southern) of the competition.<\/p>\n<p>In 2025\/26, we staged a dramatic comeback to beat Newport County 2-1, before narrowly losing to Exeter City and Cardiff City to exit the group stage.<\/p>\n<p>Our best run came in 2021\/22, under Kevin Betsy, when we reached the quarter-final stage, before suffering a 1-0 defeat to League One side Wigan Athletic.<\/p>\n<p>All first group-stage will get underway in September 2026, with a full breakdown of fixtures to follow.<\/p>\n<p>Should we progress beyond the group stage, the knockout stage schedule is as follows:<\/p>\n<p>Round of 16 &#8211; week commencing December 7, 2026<\/p>\n<p>Quarter-final &#8211; week commencing January 11, 2027<\/p>\n<p>Semi-final &#8211; week commencing March 8, 2027<\/p>\n<p>Final &#8211; Sunday, April 11, 2027<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>Copyright 2026 The Arsenal Football Club Limited. Permission to use quotations from this article is granted subject to appropriate credit being given to www.arsenal.com as the source.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The group-stage draw for the EFL Trophy took place on Thursday afternoon, as our under-21s found out their opponents for 2026\/27. Known as the Vertu Trophy, our under-21s will face London sides AFC Wimbledon, Leyton Orient and Barnet in Group F (Southern) of the competition. In 2025\/26, we staged a dramatic comeback to beat Newport [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9791,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sport"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportings.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportings.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportings.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportings.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportings.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9790"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sportings.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9790\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportings.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9791"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportings.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportings.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportings.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}