The draw for the UEFA Champions League Quarter Finals has been made, so we deep-dive the permutations and ask the big questions ahead of the ties.
Everyone knows that the Champions League only really starts to get serious in the knockout rounds. The Groups, while lucrative, can be something of a procession, in which the polarization of modern football is laid bare across Tuesday and Wednesday nights for everyone to see. The differences in financial clout between the most valuable leagues in Europe and the peripheral countries is often fairly detrimental to the competitiveness of the tournament: year on year, the number of blowouts goes up, the correlation between seedings and final placings maintains in lockstep and, in general, jeopardy diminishes. At times, the Champions League is just too much of a closed shop.
If you’re the sort of person who has lost interest in Champions League football because of this, then the first knockout round of this year’s competition will have felt like a breath of fresh air. For the first time in a long time, the UCL was a place of underdog shocks, come-from-behind narratives and high intrigue. Even the VAR couldn’t ruin the drama.
Ajax Amsterdam, once great but now very much part of Europe’s second tier, turfed out triple champions Real Madrid. Manchester United became the first team in Champions League history to overcome a two-goal deficit away from home to defeat Paris St Germain with a controversial, VAR-assisted last-minute penalty. Roma went two nil up, then three two up in the second leg, only to lose to Porto in extra time. Liverpool bossed Bayern Munich in Bavaria. Atletico Madrid took a two goal lead to Turin, only for Cristiano Ronaldo to score a hat-trick and send Juve through. A night later, as if offended, Leo Messi insouciantly destroyed Lyon. Going into the second half of the second leg, six of the eight ties were still in the balance. It was, by anyone’s standards, superb.
Which brings us on to the next stage. Eight teams remain. The ties have been drawn. Here’s five questions that will need sorting out in the quarterfinals of the 2018/19 UEFA Champions League.
1 – Can Ajax keep the fairytale alive?
Fairytales rarely happen in the Champions League. The history of the competition is littered with underdogs who made us believe, but eventually fell short. Dinamo Kiev, led by a young Andrei Shevchenko, stunned Real Madrid in 1999, only to fall in the semis. A year later, Valencia shocked the world by going one better and reaching the final. More recently, a Kylian Mbappe-inspired Monaco put out Borussia Dortmund and Manchester City en route to the semis.
What all those sides have in common is that, once their run had ended, the star players were cherry-picked off and the team dismantled. Ajax know this all too well: indeed, their star man Frenkie de Jong has already been sold to Barcelona for more than $100m. In all likelihood, the likes of Hakim Ziyech, Matthijs De Ligt and Donny van de Beek will follow. This could be their last hurrah in Holland, and with a tie against Juventus coming up, they will fancy their chances.
Juve are a great side, but they are very much at the other end of the age spectrum to Ajax. The Dutch side proved against Real that they can rip teams apart using skill and pace. Chiellini et al will not relish the idea of Ziyech and co baring down on them, with Dusan Tadic, rejuvenated in Amsterdam, scheming away. Ajax should have no fear going to Turin.
2 – Should Liverpool concentrate on the Champions League?
Liverpool are a club defined by their performances in Europe. Their five Champions League/European Cup titles stands alone in English football, and few arenas can compete with Anfield on a European night. In Porto, they have got arguably the weakest team left in the competition and thus the best draw that they could have hoped for. If they don’t make the semifinals, it will be a major disappointment.
The only question, however, might be how much they actually want to progress in Europe. They currently lie one point back in the race for the Premier League title, a victory that would mean infinitely more to the club than a Champions League win. Liverpool have been starved of success in the league since 1990 and many fans would rather the club concentrate fully on ending their Premier League drought. Jürgen Klopp will feel that his team and compete on two fronts, but when push comes to shove, he might well choose to prioritize domestic glory.
3 – Can Manchester City win the quadruple?
As much as Liverpool crave Premier League success, so Manchester City need a European trophy to validate the huge sums spent on their team by the Abu Dhabi hierarchy. On top of their battles in the Premier League and the Champions League, they are also still competing in the FA Cup. Having won the League Cup at the end of February, this presents them with the chance of an unprecedented quadruple.
Competing on four fronts tends to have a fairly calamitous effect on fixture scheduling, however – probably why nobody else has managed to win all the cups in recent memory.
