Real Madrid starts this Tuesday, September 6, the defense of the Champions League title. Ancelotti's team opens in the group stage against Celtic Glasgow and does so away from home at a Celtic Park where they have never won. He has only visited this fief on one occasion, in the 1980 quarter-finals, in which Real Madrid had to pull epically at the Bernabeu to come back from a 2-0 loss on Scottish soil.
The current European champion was placed in group F, along with Leipzig, Shakhtar Donetsk and Celtic. A group in which they should have no problem qualifying for the next round, something they have been achieving uninterruptedly for 28 years, with the sole exception of the 2012-13 season, when Chelsea left the Whites out of the group stage .
Celtic Glasgow present themselves with an impeccable seven out of seven on this first day of the group stage. The Catholics have won their seven games at the start of the campaign (six in the league and one in the League Cup) with spectacular records: 29 goals for and only one against.
Their superiority in Scotland, only broken two seasons ago by Steven Gerrard's Glasgow Rangers, is abysmal, but Europe, and more specifically, the Champions League, where they have not competed since 2017, is another story. Being here has been helped by the exclusion of Russian football, which allowed the Scottish champions to enter directly into the world's top club competition without having to go through previous rounds.
The main offensive weapon of Real Madrid's first European rival is that of the Portuguese striker Jota, for whom Celtic paid Benfica 7 million this summer. The 23-year-old is proving to be a good investment for the Scots and has been involved in eight of the team's goals between goals and assists. Together with the Israeli Liel Abada, with six goals in six games, they are the main weapons of the team, especially now that the presence of the Japanese Kyogo Furuhashi, who retired injured this weekend, is in doubt
Celtic and Real Madrid meet this Tuesday, September 6, at Celtic Park in Glasgow. The match, corresponding to the first day of the Champions League group stage, will start at 9:00 p.m. and can be seen through Movistar Champions League. Also, as always, La Vanguardia will offer minute by minute live with all the details of the match.
Check here all the results of the group stage of the Champions League.
