Liverpool have discovered the eight opponents they’ll face in the newly-expanded UEFA Champions League’s 36-team league phase.
A major revamp to the tournament sees all 36 clubs grouped in one overall table, with each team facing eight different sides to determine the finishing positions and, subsequently, the composition of the draw for the knockout rounds.
We won’t know the exact sequence of the fixtures until those are announced on Saturday, but we have learned which teams Arne Slot’s Reds will be facing, and whether those will be at home or away.
Our opponents in the league phase of the 2024-25 @ChampionsLeague pic.twitter.com/5gMriXTaeB
— Liverpool FC (@LFC) August 29, 2024
There’ll be no shortage of memories – for better and for worse – of past European Cup/Champions League finals, with Liverpool facing both Real Madrid and AC Milan. The reigning title holders come to Anfield, while we’ll have a trip to the San Siro.
LFC will have two opponents from Germany, with Xabi Alonso returning to Merseyside as Bayer Leverkusen boss and the Reds travelling to face RB Leipzig, who we eliminated from this tournament in the round of 16 in 2020/21.
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The other two teams making the trip to Anfield are Lille (who we met in the 2009/10 Europa League) and tournament newcomers Bologna, who’ll be hoping to emulate the feat of fellow Serie A outfit Atalanta last April by winning in L4.
They’re not the only Champions League first-timer that Liverpool will face, with Slot’s team off to Spain to face Girona, who are part of the City Football Group portfolio.
Our new head coach will also be going back to his native Netherlands to take on PSV Eindhoven, who we met six times in this competition when Rafael Benitez was in charge.
The draw certainly could’ve been kinder to Liverpool, who’ve suffered a lot at the hands of Real Madrid over the past decade (two final losses, two other knockout round eliminations, a pair of group defeats in 2014) and face a Leverkusen side who lost only one match in the whole of last season.
All eight of our opponents are from domestic leagues which rank in the top six of UEFA’s association club coefficient, although the flip side of that coin is that we don’t have any far-flung trips to eastern Europe, which’ll be appreciated from a travel/logistical perspective.
It’ll only be as the tournament progresses in its new format that we get a handle on the mindset in which we’ll approach each fixture, but with each position counting for something when the knockout rounds commence, there should be something riding on every single game that we play.
Some tough tests await, but it’s great to be back in the Champions League after our absence from the competition last term!
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