The group stage draw, which serves as the Uefa Champions League’s annual appetizer, takes place on Thursday afternoon. Many ingrained habits will be broken amidst the customary red carpet rituals.
With Manchester City as the new champion, the European Cup, as it is still known, has one significant novelty. A number of the rivals are conspicuously absent. No mention will be made of usual suspects like Liverpool, Juventus, Chelsea, or Ajax, who all failed to make the cut, as the names of the clubs are drawn at random from bowls into their eight groups of four.
For the first time in twenty years, neither of the two competitors who had the greatest impact on the competition in the twenty-first century are listed on the starting grid.
The four-time champion Lionel Messi and the five-time gold medalist Cristiano Ronaldo both compete outside of the Uefa fold today.
They can’t help but believe that the comparable North American and Asian tournaments they, as the leaders of Inter Miami and Al Nassr, are involved in, are moving closer in step with Europe’s Big Cup as they keep a distant eye on how a new Champions League season unfolds.
When the expanded Club World Cup, featuring 32 teams, debuts in the summer of 2025, people are entitled to wonder how long the Uefa Champions League, a huge global broadcast phenomenon, will maintain its position as club football’s pinnacle. The various continental competitions that will be held in the upcoming season will give more clubs, from more facets of the game, the opportunity to participate in this grandiose, Fifa-run spectacle.
If Messi keeps enhancing the performances of the Florida club in the manner he has since joining in July, it is possible that a 38-year-old Messi could be there in 2025, wearing his Miami jersey.
Ronaldo’s assistance last week in the Asian Champions League play-offs allowed Al Nassr to advance, giving the Saudi Arabian club a chance to win the continental championship and, with it, a spot in the expanded 2025 Club World Cup alongside Al Hilal and Urawa Red Devils, the two previous Asian club champions.
So much for the mid-term time frame. At Thursday’s draw ceremony in Monaco, clubs like City, Real Madrid, Paris Saint-Germain, and Barcelona won’t be as concerned with the fact that they’ve said goodbye to players like Riyad Mahrez, Karim Benzema, Neymar, who are all playing in the Saudi Pro League, and Sergio Busquets, who is now playing in Miami, as a result of the growing popularity of club football in the US and the Gulf. They are concerned about potential group stage dangers that could still affect so-called superclubs with good seeds.
Madrid, the most successful club in European Cup history and the 14th champion in 2022, might be placed in a group with City and AC Milan. All three were semifinalists in May, but due to the seeding system’s preference for domestic league champions and ranking of the remaining teams based on their performances in Europe over a longer period of time, Milan is in the lowly Pot 3 and Madrid, the La Liga runners-up last season, is in the higher Pot 2.
Champions League final standings: Man City 1, Inter Milan 0.
Newcastle United is one of the “outsiders” in Pot 4, the teams with the lowest rankings.
Real Madrid, AC Milan, and Bayern Munich might all wind up cooped up with upwardly-mobile Mapgies. To the knockout rounds, only two teams may advance.
Newcastle’s last appearance in the Champions League was in a losing pre-qualifier 20 years ago. There is absolutely no precedent for Union Berlin, which is also in Pot 4. Their rapid rise from Germany’s second division to fourth place in the Bundesliga last season took only four short years, and their presence, like that of a Newcastle transformed since 2021 by Saudi Arabian investment, speaks of shifting spheres of influence in elite club football.
Given that East Germany, then a separate country in the sporting shadow of the wealthier West, is represented by both Union and RB Leipzig in the draw, half of the German team hails from that region.
City must enter the game as the favorite, but they should be aware that the Uefa Champions League has an element of unpredictability because almost no winner is able to repeat their success year after year. Only Real Madrid, who won the championship three times in a row from 2016 to 2018, has done so since 1990.
As City manager Pep Guardiola frequently warns, the holders frequently face the enemy of fatigue because they must participate in more competitions as a result of their success.
One of them is the Club World Cup, which is still a small winter tournament this year but will soon grow significantly and strive to surpass Uefa’s Champions League in terms of glamour and truly global reach.
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