Olympique de Marseille, Milan, Ajax, Juventus, Borussia Dortmund, Real Madrid, Manchester United, Bayern Munich, Porto, Liverpool, Barça, Inter and Chelsea. Thirteen are the teams that have been able to lift the Champions League trophy on occasion, released in 1992. This year's will be a special edition. The thirtieth anniversary of the top European club competition, the one that entertains every Tuesday and Wednesday night during the winter and creates indelible moments in the history of sport during the spring.
He has left unthinkable endings, such as the one won by Manchester United in 1999 with a comeback in discount against Bayern Munich or that of Liverpool in 2005, after turning around a 3-0 against Milan led by Carlo Ancelotti. Miracles of this magnitude can only happen on a stage of this caliber, in which stage fright, mental strength, the atmosphere or the weight of history are factors as important as the football level of the players and teams.
However, to get to live those moments that everyone dreams of, it is necessary to overcome a long and hard road, full of endless trips, games in the cold and rain and countless minutes of play. This route is even longer for some clubs that had to risk their classification in a preliminary phase in the heat of the August heat wave. Benfica, Viktoria Plzen and Maccabi Haifa have done their homework and will be in this Thursday's draw. The teams that will occupy the last three vacant places in the fourth pot will be settled in the duels between Dinamo Zagreb and Bodo/Glimt, PSV and Rangers and Trabzonspor and Copenhagen.
For the rest, the four drums of the draw are already established. As always, the winners of last season's Champions League and Europa League come first, along with the domestic champions. The other three gradually go down in level. However, in all of them there is more than one European champion club. Even in the last one, where Olympique de Marseille, Celtic de Glasgow and, perhaps, PSV, three historic teams in the competition, come together. This only highlights the difficulty of being the one who ends up lifting the trophy in June.
Even taking into account that teams from the same pot and from the same country cannot coincide in this first phase, the chances of seeing more than one favorite team for the title in the same group are very high. In the worst possible scenario, defending champions Real Madrid could go down alongside their rivals in last year's final, Liverpool, Inter Milan and Olympique de Marseille. Perhaps the kindest fate for the Whites would be to coincide with RB Leipzig, Shakhtar Donetsk and Viktoria Plzen.
FC Barcelona, meanwhile, is in the second pot, finishing last season in second place in La Liga. In this way, the faces could be seen, in the worst of the forecasts, with Paris Saint-Germain, Bayern Munich or Manchester City, the 'coconuts' of pot one, Inter and Olympique de Marseille (it could not coincide with PSG). The curiosity would be assured in case of being framed with Eintracht Frankfurt, after the taking of the Camp Nou by the German fans in the last edition of the Europa League. The other two qualified Spanish teams, Atlético de Madrid and Sevilla, will be in the same pot as Barça, so the rivals to avoid and the desirable ones are the same.
Among the main favorites to reach the final, which will be played on June 10, 2023 at the Atatürk Olympic Stadium, famous for hosting the 'Miracle of Istanbul' in 2005, are the defending champions, Manchester City, Bayern Munich and the PSG. Pep Guardiola's men have been reinforced with the missing piece to close the qualifiers, Erling Haaland; the Bavarians continue to overwhelm Germany and are always a continental threat; and the Parisians will want to make up for it after the elimination against Real Madrid. It remains to be seen if Liverpool, who have started the season badly in the Premier, or Barça, whose ceiling is still unknown, could sneak into this discussion.
The weakest teams a priori concentrate on the last two pots, but among them some possible revelations stand out. The aforementioned Olympique de Marseille is the team in the fourth pot that everyone wants to avoid. Undefeated in three Ligue 1 games, they have signed Alexis Sánchez, Nuno Tavares, Mattéo Guendouzi and Cengiz Ünder and are the main alternative to PSG in France. Club Brugge, with an inspired Ferran Jutglà (three goals in the Belgian league), is also an uncomfortable opponent, who has already given the occasional scare in past editions. For his part, the one who ends up qualifying from PSV-Rangers will be another of the undesirable rivals of the last hype. The Scots were finalists in the Europa League and the Dutch, unbeaten in the Eredivisie, have, among others, Ibrahim Sangaré, one of the most coveted midfielders on the European scene.
