Champions League group stage draw in Monaco

The draw for the Champions League group stage on Thursday created very unequal groups in terms of team selection. In some, at least “on paper”, the degree of intrigue is low: they promise the giants an easy path to the playoffs. In some, on the contrary, everything is terribly confused. First of all, this concerns group F, in which even the formal favorite PSG should be afraid of the formal outsider – Newcastle.

Most of the comments under notes about draw the group stage of this Champions League on the websites of large and respected media resources like the BBC, of ​​course, belonged to the group F. The band is really too special to ignore. “Group of death” or “group-fireworks”, as it was sometimes called, savoring in advance all the sharpness of what could happen in it.

The degree of intrigue in this quartet was provided, of course, first of all by Newcastle.

The club, which for a long time did not know any serious international successes, was seeded only in the fourth “basket” due to the low rating before the draw. Meanwhile, say, the Gracenote website, which compiled an alternative, “correct” classification, believed that, based on real possibilities, a suitable place for it is the second “basket”, that is, the one where even some unconditional giants are placed. In the end, we are talking about a densely staffed team, which may not have had a very successful start this season, but in the previous championship of England, the strongest championship of the continent, it was fourth – ahead of Liverpool, Tottenham, Chelsea. And most importantly, she played quite at the level of traditional English leaders.

And besides Newcastle, there are two strong clubs in this amazing group for which flying past the playoffs, in other words, finishing below the second position, will definitely be equated with failure – Borussia Dortmund and Milan, as well as the mysterious formal favorite. God bless them, these eternal problems of PSG in the Champions League, in the end they crawl out, as a rule, after all, not in the group round, but after it. More importantly, hardly anyone today can say what the Parisian club is, from which Lionel Messi and Neymar escaped in the summer and which underwent a dramatic personnel restructuring, including the arrival of a whole group of newcomers and a new coach, Luis Enrique. On the contrary, it would hardly be surprising if it took PSG a lot of time to get used to its schemes.

On even, with a rather confusing layout, three more quartets are pulled.

IN group B Sevilla and Arsenal, clubs in the top baskets, should hardly be lenient on PSV and Lance. IN group C the outsider’s slot went to the German sensation of last season “Union”. It must be assumed that the fans of Napoli and Real Madrid, seeing that it was the sharp-toothed Berliners who fell to their favorite clubs along with Braga, were not happy. IN group D neither Benfica nor Inter can feel calm in confrontations with Salzburg and Real Sociedad, which provided this Champions League with at least a minimal “Russian component”: Arsene moved to the Spanish club from Dynamo in August Zakharyan.

The format of the rest of the groups is more or less “classic”, with a fairly clear “stratification” into niches. Well, let’s say it’s hard to imagine that Bayern and Manchester United will not survive the battles with Copenhagen and Galatasaray, that Manchester City, the current owner of the most prestigious club trophy, will have a hard time in the company of Leipzig , Red Star and Young Boys that Barcelona will suddenly stumble when competing with Porto, Shakhtar and Antwerp, and that Atlético will not slip into the 1/8 finals, playing with Lazio , Feyenoord and Celtic.

Alexey Dospekhov