The league phase of the Champions League is set, a dizzying collage of 144 games between early September and late January that will set Europe's best clubs on course for the final at Madrid's Estadio Metropolitano on June 5.
Such an overwhelming schedule can sometimes be tough to parse through. Will holders Paris Saint-Germain welcome the competitive tune up that comes with games against Barcelona and Manchester City? Is it good news for Aston Villa that they get to go back to Istanbul, scene of their Europa League triumph, as part of two games against Turkish opposition? And are there any teams for whom the best outcome is simply the taking part? Let's parse through what the holy trinity of Thierry Henry, David Villa and Giorgio Marchetti have delivered...
Winners: Liverpool
The new league phase format makes the variance in draw quality notably less pronounced than in the previous iteration of four groups of eight. Back then, get the best that Pot Two had to offer and one of those arrivistes that hovered around Pot Four and you could be in for a really tricky time. Or you could be Manchester City and meander your way to 15-plus points every autumn without catching any attention.
Now, well, everyone is going to get two from each section. There's only so much damage Pot One can do to your chances, only so many solids that Pot Three can afford you. Having said that, Liverpool have come out better than most. Atletico Madrid are the weakest of the Pot One teams according to both their Elo rating and the quality of the squad they can put on the field. Inter too are one of the more favorable teams that Pot One could deliver, though both these teams might also be happier with Liverpool than PSG, Bayern Munich or Arsenal.
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Further down there are trips to a weakened Club Brugge and Austrian side LASK while home games against Porto, Villarreal and Lens should be easy enough to negotiate. Fenerbahce away promises to be a hostile atmosphere for a team who were downed by Galatasaray last season but Andoni Iraola can feel that he is not spending too much of his first Champions League season swimming with the big beasts.
Indeed, a run at the top two seems eminently plausible. The luck of the draw was not on table-topping Liverpool's side when they got PSG in 2025 but the best way to manipulate the odds in your favor is to finish as high as possible in the league phase. That should be achievable for Liverpool.
Losers: Atletico Madrid
The inverse of Liverpool's draw came to the Metropolitano, where the path to playing a Champions League final at their home stadium just got an awful lot harder for Atletico Madrid. Not so difficult that you would look at their eight games and fear a genuine risk of 2022-23, when they crashed out of Europe entirely in the group stage. Landing a bum draw in the playoffs and suffering a pre-round of 16 exit? That is a real risk for last season's semifinalists.
None of their home games look favorable. Bayern Munich will be favorites when they meet, Manchester United might have Atleti beat on pure talent and Viking will approach their trip to the Spanish capital with a fearlessness that has often discombobulated this team. So too has the full-throated attack and aggressive man-to-man marking of Dutch sides like PSV Eindhoven. Add in a trip to the Arctic Circle to face Bodo/Glimt, who knocked out Inter and beat Manchester City last season, and a tricky assignment against Stuttgart and you have one of the toughest league phase assignments for an elite outfit.
Winners: Sabah
Perhaps I am underrating the champions of Azerbaijan, who became only the second team in the last 13 seasons to beat perennial champions Qarabag to the title. Having come all the way through the first qualifying round -- a 4-1 aggregate win over Welsh side The New Saints -- and then beaten teams from Finland, Denmark and Israel, they will certainly be battle-hardened when their debut in the competition proper rolls around. However, it seems fair to assume that when you are in the Champions League for the first time in your nine (??!!) year history, you want to take in the sights and sounds.
What could be better for Sabah than to land some of the biggest names the sport has to offer. Grand old Barcelona rocking up to Baku, where it appears Sabah's games will have to be hosted given that their home ground does not meet UEFA requirements. Borussia Dortmund and Napoli too, clubs replete with history. Away days against Manchester United and Arsenal will be unforgettable.
Then again, you don't want to leave the competition empty-handed, and perhaps Sabah will have a chance of picking up a point or two along the way. Slavia Prague were the top-ranked of the Pot Four teams but at least Valdas Dambrauskas' side get to play them at home. Another game away to Viking, ranked 35th out of 36 on coefficient points? Well maybe there would be a chance at history.
Losers: Barcelona, Borussia Dortmund, Villarreal, Viking
Of course the flip side to the Sabah story is that they are a really, really, really long way from anyone else. The Azeri capital of Baku is nearer to Delhi than it is to the cities from which its Spanish opponents hail, a round trip of nearly 5,000 miles for their supporters and players to a city further east than Aleppo and Baghdad.
Sabah have earned the right to play their Champions League games. Those fans of all four visiting teams who make the journey will find a beautiful city that has proven to be a welcoming host for most of its visitors at major sporting events. The players, though, are in for a slog for no other reason than this being an incredibly long way to travel in the middle of a brutal season. If there was any team outside the top nine that these clubs would have wanted to avoid, it may well have been Sabah. A long road lies ahead for this quartet.
Winner: Jose Mourinho
His tactics might be outmoded. He may not be able to communicate with young men in the way he once did. His track record of success is now studded with fairly notable failures when he has not had the biggest budget in the league. And yet still there is no one better at constructing narrative arcs for themselves than Jose Mourinho.
It is not just that he gets to welcome back the fanbase whose love for him might be the most unqualified, Inter rocking up to the Santiago Bernabeu to pay homage to the man who delivered their famous treble. He goes back to the Eternal City, where he is perhaps as popular with Roma fans who were tear-stained when he departed. Arsenal supporters will be weeping that he is still turning up. He'll get his particular kind of needle at them by bringing Vinicius Junior along after a summer where the Gunners dreamed of getting him.
Mourinho's most impressive trick of all, though, might be how he has concocted yet another return to Stamford Bridge. Chelsea aren't even in the Champions League and yet the particular magic of a Champions League draw has brought him back along the King's Road, where Shakhtar Donetsk will be playing their games this season.
Truly only Mourinho could find a way for the spotlight to shine so brightly on him... assuming he has not been sacked by the time these games come around.
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