Last week I asked the question could every one of England’s six Champions League teams reach the quarterfinals? And look, it was a valid scenario worthy of considering. A long shot certainly, with an implied probability of 3.8% based on bookmakers’ odds, but one of the reasons that we enjoy talking about sports is that we’re often glued to our TVs when the 3.8% probability thing happens.
Anyway, it is fair to say that since then, the odds have changed somewhat. Based on bookmakers’ odds on Monday morning, we’re looking at a 0.03% chance of the Premier League sextet advancing. We’re not quite in shark attack or winning the lottery territory, but we are in check whether those things are more likely than Tottenham overcoming Atletico Madrid land.
Funnily enough, however, the fixture list ahead of us has afforded another 3.8% probability scenario for us to mull over. That’ll be, what if all six English teams get eliminated? Seems a bit low, right? That’ll be the underdogs Bayer Leverkusen and Galatasaray dragging down the European super clubs, who take awe-inspiring leads into the second leg. Then again, neither Paris Saint-Germain nor Real Madrid are the team most likely to reach the last eight. That’ll be Atletico Madrid, and it is with their opponent that we start our rankings of which teams are most likely to be eliminated:
1. Tottenham
Yeah, they’re gone. In the history of the Champions League, only four teams have overcome a three-goal-plus deficit from the first leg: Liverpool and Roma against Barcelona in 2018-19 and 2017-18, perhaps some karmic rebalancing of the Remontada when Barca roared back from four down to eliminate PSG a year earlier. Before then, it had only been done by Deportivo La Coruna against Milan in 2003-04. This quartet had one unifying factor that Tottenham don’t. They were quite good. Certainly not trapped in a fight for survival in their domestic league.
Frankly, what’s more interesting, where Spurs are concerned right now, is what exactly they do about Igor Tudor. Before his side took the field at Anfield it seemed pretty obvious that he would have to go and quite soon at that. The inconsistency of selection, the attempts to force a back three and aggressive press on a squad that wasn’t suited for it, with little to no time on the training ground, the baffling man-management of Antonin Kinsky. All those things happened, and they were happening amid results that suggested this new manager bounce had gone through the floor and down another 12 flights of stairs.
And yet against Liverpool, Spurs played like a team that understood the assignment. Tudor made adjustments, and they proved effective, the 4-4-2 mid-block both swallowed up Liverpool attacks and sprung out into counters that did create a few promising openings. If that were any manager’s fifth game, they’d feel hard done by if they got the sack. Then you are reminded how often Tottenham’s woes were out of Tudor’s control. He wouldn’t have told Micky van de Ven to throw himself into the most ludicrous challenges possible. Whatever he expected from Kinsky, it wasn’t that. And Tottenham weren’t actually that bad in the bits where their goalkeeper wasn’t kicking the ball to the opponent. Every English team that lost by three goals could feel they were harshly punished for their mistakes and barely rewarded for their successes. For Tudor, the same was probably true against Crystal Palace, when his team was leading before Van de Ven got himself sent off and handed the opposition a penalty.
So you can make a case for the defense post-Liverpool, but what happens if it blows up again against Atleti? Do you sack him then and give a new interim less than four days before Spurs’ biggest game since the Europa League final, a relegation dogfight against Nottingham Forest? The stakes are so high, the margins ever thinner. In such circumstances, the Champions League scarcely merits a mention.
2. Chelsea
What does it take to pull off one of those aforementioned Champions League miracles? Star players first and foremost, and given Chelsea have beaten PSG by three goals in the last 12 months, admittedly under very different circumstances, we can assume they can field them. Blind faith, too, something we can assume would be relatively easy to insert into Chelsea’s pre-match ritual. Perhaps to show the depths of their respect for the football, Liam Rosenior’s men could burn an effigy of its mortal enemy, Lukas Podolski’s left foot, before kick off.
What you’re also going to need though, is composure and discipline in abundance. And, without blowing the whole center circle thing out of all proportion, you can see on so many occasions that this is a team that does not have those intangibles. Think of Newcastle’s winner on Saturday, when Wesley Fofana never started running with Anthony Gordon over his shoulder. This is a team that leads the league in yellows for ill-discipline and who indulged in a string of temper tantrums at the Parc des Princes. Pedro Neto was lucky to evade a ban for lobbing the ball at a ball boy while the club vice-captain ended the game berating the error-addled Filip Jorgensen, who probably didn’t need his teammates turning on him.
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Whether the head loss begat the collapse or the first signs of danger begat the head loss isn’t really the point. Before Khvicha Kvaratskhelia came on the pitch, Chelsea could reasonably contend they were playing PSG to a tee. The European champions had the ball but couldn’t really get in the box, the Blues meanwhile were punchy on the counter. Even when Vitinha restored PSG’s lead, it just needed some cool heads to rally the troops, to remind them that 3-2 is an eminently retrievable situation at Stamford Bridge. What transpired ensured that there is no realistic prospect of a recovery. After all, even if Chelsea do get into the right sort of situation, can they be trusted to execute?
3. Manchester City
Now we take a step up in possibility, albeit only from it ain’t happening to so you’re telling me there’s a sliver of a scintilla of a chance. In the most basic, there are still a few players left in the Manchester City side who have seen enough done enough and had enough done to them by Real Madrid to believe they can overturn the odds in those most reliably unpredictable of European ties. “It’s not a Real Madrid night,” Bernardo Silva said on Monday. “We need to have a Manchester City night because we’ve had many of those when people didn’t believe in us, and things have gone well.
“Madrid have had many nights in the last few years, and what we want is to create an atmosphere of belief in the stadium as early as possible, to score a goal. With one goal, the atmosphere of the whole stadium will change.”
It’s not the only thing that could and should change. Rayan Cherki will surely come back into the side given that Pep Guardiola acknowledged after the draw to West Ham that he should have been in the weekend’s XI to begin with. It was a similar story in the Santiago Bernabeu where it felt like there was too much overlap in the trio of Jeremy Doku, Antoine Semenyo and Savinho.
Doku was very effective at getting into the box, but on a night when his radar was off, having Cherki as the guy to pick out Erling Haaland would have gone a long way. Guardiola believes that Cherki, Doku and Haaland leave City a bit too easily bypassed in the Premier League, but on a day like Tuesday, he’s going to have to gamble that when Madrid do bypass the attack, Vinicius Junior, Kylian Mbappe and Jude Bellingham don’t punish them.
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You wouldn’t fancy City in a track meet with Madrid, but they do have Erling Haaland. A horribly out of form, seemingly struggling for fitness Haaland, but still Haaland. If the early-season iteration can get back on the field for one game and if Guardiola can provide a supporting cast that makes shots for him, then there’s a hope that City can score their three goals. Stopping their visitors from doing anything at the other end? That might just be in the lap of the gods.
4. Liverpool
You thought it’d be Newcastle here, right? More on them in a moment, and really Liverpool are down here as much due to my bullishness about the Magpies as anything wrong with them. It should all be fine, particularly given that the sweep of Galatasaray’s European results both this season and beyond suggests this is a team that maximizes its home advantage and really struggles on the road. At home, the Turkish giants are 4-1-1 with a goal difference of plus six and a non-penalty expected goal difference per 90 of 0.36. They are chaotic in the best possible way, ferocious in the duels (only Inter and Manchester City are more successful on home soil), and utterly fearless in the way they attack. To get a sense of what they can be like on the road (a win against a then-collapsing Ajax apart), just go and see how Galatasaray defended their huge lead in Turin like they were playing Buckaroo.
Though we may be overextrapolating from a small sample size of this season’s Champions League, there’s not a lot to give you faith in Okan Buruk’s side calmly seeing out their advantage on the road. There are the same questions we had last week about what happens if Victor Osimhen just wins a couple of crucial duels, but really, what we have to ask is whether we believe that Liverpool can get the two or perhaps more goals that they’ll need to avoid the lottery of a shootout. The last few games have crystallised that sense of a team a fair way below the level of their talent around the penalty area.
Liverpool don’t press anywhere near as well as they used to under Jurgen Klopp. They don’t have a thundering midfield presence like Declan Rice or Moises Caicedo to stop opponents from breaking out on turnovers. And they don’t really have the guile to break down a low block. That’s how you end up with an attacking half touch map as underwhelming as this against Galatasaray, who, it should be noted, spent the first five minutes kicking the ball to the guys in the green shirts.
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The 33 touches Liverpool registered in Galatasaray’s box were a smidge below their season average. No such trouble against Tottenham, but, well, that was Tottenham. You’d expect better. At the moment, it’s a struggle to tell you what the thing is that Arne Slot’s team has that can get them a lot of prime penalty box possession from open play. Thank goodness they discovered that they, too, were allowed to hit corners towards that meat wall in the six-yard box. Florian Wirtz, Mohamed Salah, Hugo Ekitike, Dominik Szoboszlai: all of them could do something magic to swing this tie Liverpool’s way. Szoboszlai frequently does. While you’re not sure what the plan is to exert overwhelming pressure, though, you do have to wonder if something might go wrong.
5. Newcastle United
Now, of course, Barcelona have the advantage in terms of talent and experience of big European nights, to say nothing of the exceptional 5-2 win over Sevilla with which they prepared for this game. Hansi Flick’s team is a serious contender, probably the third-favorite, to win this whole thing. However, Newcastle look to be a really bad matchup for their qualities.
Barcelona want to control possession, but no team allowed them to complete fewer passes than Newcastle, who also held them to a 80.8% pass completion rate that was their season low. Progressing the ball on the carry was no less difficult; the only time when a full complement of 11 players completed fewer progressive carries this season for the Blaugrana was against PSG. Getting the ball up the flanks was no easy task; Lewis Hall and Kieran Trippier were titanic out of possession.
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Meanwhile, the pressure they put on the ball didn’t really slow down Newcastle that much either. Malick Thiaw and Dan Burn are not as perturbed by pressure as many of the opponents that Barcelona will run into in LaLiga, and the midfielders ahead of them looked very at ease with what was thrown at them. It helped too that every one of the Magpies’ forwards had the pace to punish any lapses in that famously high line of their opponents, and that was without speedster Anthony Gordon.
William Osula and Anthony Elanga both made 13 runs in behind, goalscorer Harvey Barnes nine, and their backline — Aaron Ramsdale’s passing was particularly smart — were adept at cutting out the midfield to find their forward in positions to go one vs. one. Moving from the interior into wide areas, the Newcastle front three asked questions of Barcelona all night. Now imagine they do the same, but with Gordon in the floating center forward role occupied by Osula.
Even with their star attacker back, repeating the trick is going to be a challenge for Newcastle. It is just not a given that the back four can be that good when it’s Lamine Yamal and Raphinha asking the questions. Equally, it would be mad to think that Barcelona are going to do anything different. Two seasons in, Flick hasn’t adapted to any opponent or many circumstances yet. Barcelona will play their way, and it is one that Newcastle are particularly well-placed to exploit.
6. Arsenal
This might be the only English team who do actually make the quarter finals — I’m just on the pro-Premier League side with Newcastle and Liverpool — and it may not be that easy. After all, Mikel Arteta is not a coach who would approach circumstances like this and think it’s time to cut loose and run up the goals. Arsenal are going to trust their defense to leave their attack with not that much required, and rightly so.
You could make the case that the 1-1 draw at Bayer Leverkusen was one of Arsenal’s loosest games of the season so far. They switched off for kickoff in the second half, earning themselves a bit of a rollicking from Arteta in the post-match press conference. William Saliba and Jurrien Timber, the latter sidelined for the second leg, were not their usual selves in possession and when Leverkusen got the ball back, it was easier for them to counter- attack than it was in most Arsenal performances. What did this off night from the defense result in? Ten shots for Leverkusen, worth a combined 0.85 xG. A bad night at the back for Arsenal is a good night for most other teams.
And now they are welcoming Leverkusen to somewhere Riccardo Calafiori feels very at home. “We love to defend our house, our goal, and we try to do everything,” he said. “It’s so important. When we’ve got a clean sheet, most of the time we win the game.”
For most teams, the absence of a lockdown defender like Timber should be keenly felt. Arteta, however, could roll out the impressive Cristhian Mosquera if he wants to keep a tight ship or throw the reins to Ben White, ready to start and “in a much better place” after his latest battle with injury. Whatever the back five, it’s going to take something special to breach it. And that means Arsenal don’t have to be that special at the other end.