The CL Groupstage Draw Overview

August 28th, 2008 | by: Julian | View Comments

As I sit here and type this, I’m logged into UEFA.com and waiting for the live drawing of the champions league groupstages to occur. They just keep playing the same 10 seconds of footage and looping 10 seconds of that “Champions League” song which is incredibly annoying. But back onto what’s important- the draw, and what it’ll mean for the Italian clubs.

There’s 4 pots of teams, labeled #1 to #4 (I know, shocker right?). Pot #1 supposedly contains the best teams, based off of FIFA/UEFA’s ranking coefficents. For some reason Liverpool is ahead of Real, even though Real won La Liga and Liverpool only came in 4th in the EPL. I guess it’s based on European performances… but then how are Juve and Bayern in pot 2 when they didn’t play in the CL last year? It’s kinda BS but that’s what happens when you try to assign numerical scores to soccer teams.

Here’s the groups:

#1
Manchester United
Chelsea
Liverpool
Barcelona
Arsenal
Lyon
Internazionale
Real Madrid

#2
Bayern
PSV Eindhoven
Villarreal
Roma
Porto
Werder Bremen
Sporting CP
Juventus

#3
Marseille
Zenit St. Petersburg
Steaua Bucureşti
Panathinaikos
Bordeaux
Celtic
Basel
Fenerbahçe

#4
Shakhtar Donetsk
Fiorentina
Atlético Madrid
Dynamo Kyiv
CFR Cluj
Aalborg BK
Anorthosis Famagusta
BATE

One team from each pot will be placed into a group with one team from every other pot (each group will have 1 team from pot #1, 1 from pot #2, etc. ) So there’ll be 8 groups of 4 teams each if my math is correct. The 8 group winners and runners-up go onto the knockout stages; third place finishers in the group go to the UEFA Cup; fourth place goes home. The first matches will be played on the 16/17 of September.

I’m not sure that they bar clubs from the same country from being drawn into the same groups. If they don’t, there’s a chance that 3 Italian clubs could be drawn into the same group-Inter, Roma/Juve, and Fior. If that happens, that kinda sucks because one team would be kicked to the UEFA cup at best, since only the top 2 go on in the CL.

Just found out that each country is protected from that, so each Italian club will be in a different group.