Stay up to date with notifications from The Independent

Notifications can be managed in browser preferences.

Champions League 2019: Familiar draw leaves usual suspects primed to progress once again

The repetition of a number of pairings feels another unfortunate product of the growing inequalities of the European game

Miguel Delaney
Monaco
Thursday 29 August 2019 19:03 BST
Comments
Eric Cantona wins the 2019 UEFA President's award

If the expectation is that the Champions League will once more come down to one of Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, one of the few interesting aspects of a largely underwhelming draw was when and how they interacted. Placed beside each other in the seating arrangement, they did start intensely muttering to each other on several occasions.

That was when Juventus got Bayer Leverkusen and then Lokomotiv Moscow; when Real Madrid got Paris Saint-Germain in the sole true heavyweight pairing, and then when Barcelona got Internazionale in the sole group that came anywhere close to being “of death”.

It certainly feels like the Champions League campaigns of the English clubs are going to be long-lived, or at least until after Christmas.

All of Liverpool, Manchester City and Tottenham Hotspur should really breeze through their groups. If they don’t, something will have gone badly wrong. Chelsea’s group is perhaps the toughest, with Lille, Valencia and 2018-19 revelations Ajax, but that is largely down to their current period of transition rather than the actual trickiness of the opponents. Ajax will have to adjust after selling almost all of last season’s stars, while Valencia are back suffering dysfunction again.

Another novelty of that group is that it actually provides something in the way of new fixtures. Chelsea have never met either of Ajax or Lille in this competition before, which is something that really can’t be said for Manchester City-Shakhtar Donetsk and Napoli-Liverpool.

The repetition of these pairings feels another unfortunate product of the growing inequalities of the European game, where the same clubs so regularly finish around the same positions, with that further conditioned by the necessities of this draw and keeping countries apart.

And that is really why this draw as a whole feels so underwhelming. You can pretty much predict who will qualify, based on the financial figures.

A relatively conservative pick would be: PSG and Real Madrid from Group A; Bayern Munich and Spurs from Group B; Manchester City and Atalanta from Group C; Juventus and Atletico Madrid from Group D; Liverpool and Napoli from Group E and Barcelona and Borussia Dortmund from Group F - with groups G and H those that are the most unpredictable. That is of course because neither contains a modern super-club bar a transfer-ban hobbled Chelsea, which in itself says so much.

It is also why the group stage itself will tell us little about how the 2019-20 Champions League will eventually pan out.

The only encouragement is that last season proved nobody should say anything too definitively about the modern Champions League, because of the proactive brilliance of Ajax.

There is at least hope that some clubs beyond the Dutch champions can upset the usual order. Atalanta are much admired in Italy and England through the work of Gian Piero Gasperini, with some Premier League coaches raving about the originality of his tactical ideas. He is the sort of coach that Pep Guardiola will speak about in the most enthusiastic terms before their match, and they may well give City a few problems.

Club Brugge have also added a bit of expenditure to their excellent youth production. They are of course unlikely to do anything remotely close to Ajax, but may be capable of replicating them on a lower scale.

That of course remains the hope for half the clubs in the competition.

The defending champions should progress without much trouble

That is why it feels like it won’t really kick off until spring.

Back in Monaco, one of the rumours doing the rounds as to why Ronaldo was even there - since he didn’t win any individual award - revolved around him kicking off last spring. The story was that Juventus felt it would curry favour to attend the draw, given how lenient Uefa were with him for that “thrusting” celebration against Atletico Madrid.

The two clubs meet again this group stage, in yet another rematch.

It was a draw that didn’t give anyone - or indeed Ronaldo or Messi - too much to mutter about.

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Comments

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in