The 2003âÂÂ04 UEFA Cup was won by Valencia in the final against Marseille. It wrapped up a league and UEFA Cup double for Valencia.
Porto could not defend their title as they automatically qualified for the 2003âÂÂ04 UEFA Champions League and also went on to win the final for their second European Cup title.
A total of 145 teams from 51 of 52 UEFA member associations participated in the 2003âÂÂ04 UEFA Cup (the exception being Azerbaijan which was suspended). The association ranking based on the UEFA country coefficients was used to determine the number of participating teams for each association:
Moreover, the following teams also qualified for the competition:
For the 2003âÂÂ04 UEFA Cup, the associations were allocated places according to their 2002 UEFA country coefficients, which took into account their performance in European competitions from 1997âÂÂ98 to 2001âÂÂ02.
Apart from the allocation based on the country coefficients, associations could have additional teams participating in the UEFA Cup, as noted below:
The following was the access list for this season.
Due to the UEFA Cup title holder (Porto) qualifying for the Champions League via their domestic league, the following changes to the access list were made:
Due to the suspension of Azerbaijan, the following changes to the access list were made:
The labels in the parentheses show how each team qualified for the place of its starting round:
The schedule of the competition was as follows.
In the final phase, teams played against each other over two legs on a home-and-away basis, except for the one-match final.