The Champions League began to show its full potential with the draw for the league phase, which paired Real Madrid with rivals such as Manchester City, Liverpool and Juventus, as well as forcing them to travel to Kazakhstan, and will see Barcelona take on the latest champions, PSG, and also Conference League and Club World Cup winners, Chelsea.
The hands of former players Kaka and Zlatan Ibrahimovic to extract the balls and the software to determine the eight opponents of each of the 36 participants made up in just over an hour the map of the competition, which also looks tough for PSG in their defense of the title. Luis Enrique’s side will face rivals such as Bayern, Atalanta, Tottenham, Europa League champions, Barcelona and Athletic.
With a straight face from the auditorium, Emilio Butragueño, Real Madrid’s director of institutional relations, checked in one minute that his team will meet again with Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City. It will be at the Bernabéu and it will be the fifth consecutive Champions League clash, after the Whites knocked out the English side in the play-offs last year.
At home, Real Madrid will also play Juventus, Marseille and Monaco and will visit Liverpool, Benfica, Olympiacos and Kairat Almaty. The Kazakh team, one of the debutants, is already one of the revelations, after eliminating Scottish Celtic on penalties. Playing at their home ground means a difficult journey. They play their home matches 300 kilometers away from China.
In their bid to reach the round of 16, Barça will host two of last season’s champions, PSG and Chelsea. Luis Enrique will return to Barcelona and Eintracht Frankfurt, José Luis Mendilíbar’s Olympiacos and Copenhagen will also play there.
Hansi Flick’s side will have to visit Chelsea, winners of the Conference League and the Club World Cup, who were honored by UEFA before the draw for having won all UEFA competitions. Brugge, Slavia Prague and Newcastle will be their other away opponents.
Atletico Madrid, whose delegation could not arrive in time for the draw due to weather problems, will host Inter, Eintracht Frankfurt, Bodo Glimt, with which Norway will once again have a representative after 18 years, and Union SG of Belgium. Their away matches will be in Liverpool and in London against Arsenal, as well as PSV and Galatasaray.
Athletic, who return to the Champions League after ten years, will face champions PSG, while Arsenal, Sporting and Qarabag will also play at San Mamés. Borussia Dortmund, Atalanta, Slavia Prague and Newcastle will be their away opponents.
The list of five Spanish clubs is completed by Villarreal with powerful home matches against City, Juventus, Ajax and Copenhagen and visits to Borussia Dortmund, Bayer Leverkusen, Tottenham and Cypriot Pafos, another debutant coached by Spaniard Juan Carlos Carcedo, formerly of Zaragoza, who has earned respect. They eliminated Serbian Red Star in the play-offs and, without losing a game, previously knocked out Maccabi Tel Aviv and Dynamo Kiev.
The 71st edition of the Champions League, the second under the revamped format, will also place heavy demands on its champion to try to retain the title. The large PSG delegation, led by President Nasser Al-Khelaifi, learned on site that they will play Bayern, Atalanta, Europa League champions Tottenham and Newcastle at home, and Barcelona, Leverkusen, Sprting and Athletic away.
The eight matchdays of the league phase will be played between September 16 and January 28, with all matches at the same time on this date, and UEFA will publish the calendar next Saturday, January 30.
The top eight in the standings will advance directly to the round of 16, and from the ninth to the twenty-fourth will play a playoff, to be drawn on January 30, from which the winners of the round of 16 will be drawn. This season, the classification in this league phase will be more important, as the top finishers will play the second leg of the play-offs at home.
Also starting this season, the final, which will be played on May 30 at the Puskas Arena in Budapest, will be moved from 9:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.
According to EFE, UEFA wanted to once again make a powerful showcase for its flagship competition with the exhibition of a video entitled “Here we go again” and with Sweden’s Zlatan Ibrahimovic as the protagonist before receiving the President’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
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